Smoothing the customer on-boarding process for Rakuten Securities Hong Kong

“Always Improve, Always Advance” is one of the Five Principles for Success in Rakuten Shugi (Rakuten Basic Principles). RSHK is committed to reaching their goals and maximizing customer satisfaction. In the competitive world of online forex trading, customer experience is everything. To ensure that traders choose their platform, RSHK wanted to find new and innovative ways to make their entire customer experience as seamless as possible.

With COVID-19 restricting the ability of prospective customers to get to a branch, they decided to assess their current operations and transform the customer acquisition process.

Before the project, new customers had to make an in-person appointment or download an application form from the website and send it back for review before opening an account. The process took time for customers and required dedicated RSHK resources.

“In order to be competitive in this market, we needed to ensure that we made the process of signing up as easy as possible for our clients,” says Shinichi Sasaki, General Manager, Head of Corporate Division, Rakuten Securities Hong Kong Limited.

To support this shift, RSHK wanted to create an online onboarding application that would let customers open an account anywhere, anytime. The application also needed to integrate with back-office systems, including RSHK’s enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) platform, document verification and extraction, face verification, broker system application and deposit verification. Together, these capabilities would create an end-to-end digital customer journey and improve operational efficiency.

RSHK had already engaged NTT DATA to assess the maturity of its data loss and data leakage prevention strategy. We were also RSHK’s network partner, supporting the business with agile, scalable and secure local network services. Building on our understanding of RSHK’s business, RSHK chose NTT DATA to help transform their customer acquisition process.

RSHK had a cloud and DevOps roadmap to deliver a secure, highly available and scalable experience to its customers. After the assessment, and leveraging an in-depth understanding of RSHK’s business landscape and objectives, NTT DATA proposed a cloud-native application architecture on Microsoft Azure.

By moving the onboarding process to the cloud, RSHK can ensure its customers can open an account with minimum difficulty.

RSHK and NTT DATA worked closely together to optimize the user experience, ensuring that it delivered the seamless process RSHK was looking for.

The end-to-end managed solution leveraged NTT DATA's expertise in cloud, applications and security to ensure all aspects of the solution — from architecture and design through to implementation, configuration and maintenance — worked together to help RSHK achieve its business objectives.

The infrastructure powering the solution was designed to scale to meet spikes in demand, and RSHK has full visibility of the solution, giving it advance warning of increased usage.

The entire solution was created to be secure by design, helping RSHK meet its commitments to customers and comply with data protection regulations.

“Working with NTT DATA means that we have a partner who understands our entire business, and who looks for solutions to any challenges we face,” says Tony Tsang, IT Manager, Rakuten Securities Hong Kong Limited.

This solution builds on NTT DATA’s long-standing relationship with RSHK, where we also provide agile, scalable and secure local network services to meet their evolving needs.

With the new online onboarding application, RSHK’s customers can now enjoy a fast and responsive experience anywhere, anytime.

The solution is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) regulations, ensuring all customer data are well protected and secure.

As the demand for their services evolves, and there has been a huge surge in RSHK’s internet traffic since the launch of the onboarding application, our scalable and secure local network’s bandwidth was scaled up. This ensures that all their customers are provided with the same level of service, and enjoy an exceptional, low-latency experience.

The onboarding application is the first phase of this project and with it operating smoothly, they can now focus on the other areas of their digital transformation, including greater integration with their back-office applications.

The ongoing partnership enables RSHK to focus on optimizing their customer experience, leveraging our expertise to exploit the potential of omnichannel customer journey management applications, robotic process automation and AI.

“NTT DATA’s depth of services means that they’re able to ensure that all parts of our environment are working together to help us achieve our goals,” Tsang says.

In addition, RSHK can improve their DLP program, helping them to detect and prevent data breaches, exfiltration or unwanted destruction of sensitive customer data more effectively.