“BankVision on Azure” goes live at Norinchukin Bank

Norbert Gehrke
Tokyo FinTech
Published in
4 min read1 day ago

The Norinchukin Bank has adopted “BankVision on Azure,” a full banking system utilizing public cloud provided by BIPROGY, and began operating its core banking system using this service from July 16, 2024. This marks the first operation of a full banking system in a public cloud environment for a national financial institution.

The Norinchukin Bank started operating its core banking system using “BankVision” running on Windows in September 2020. To address further customer needs while flexibly responding to changes in the market environment and achieving sustainable development of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries industries, as well as reducing system costs, Norinchukin Bank has now migrated to the cloud with “BankVision on Azure.”

About The Norinchukin Bank

The Norinchukin Bank continues to challenge itself to create new value utilizing diverse IT digital technologies to realize sustainable development of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries industries.

Furthermore, to respond to discontinuous environmental changes such as rapid IT digital development and changes in consumer purchasing behavior, Norinchukin Bank is actively working to create new business value and improve productivity through the penetration of IT digital and data utilization, and to realize a flexible and resilient organization that challenges changes.

“BankVision on Azure” at The Norinchukin Bank

The Norinchukin Bank has been using the open core banking system “BankVision” running on Windows as its core system since September 2020.

While maintaining the “stability” and “high reliability” features of “BankVision,” Norinchukin Bank has now migrated to Microsoft Azure, a public cloud platform provided by Microsoft, to achieve high flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The system began operation on July 16, 2024. Along with the migration of “BankVision” to Microsoft Azure, the bank has also migrated peripheral core systems such as the branch office system, the service gateway (internal API publishing platform), and the foreign exchange system to Microsoft Azure, maximizing the benefits of cloud usage.

“BankVision on Azure”

Since its release in May 2007 as the world’s first open core banking system running on Windows, “BankVision” achieved operation on a fully virtualized infrastructure in 2020, and in 2021, it became Japan’s first full banking system operating on a public cloud as “BankVision on Azure.”

  1. Adoption of Azure, a public cloud, as the operating infrastructure: Improved security and scalability while reducing infrastructure renewal costs. It continues to evolve steadily, catching up with the latest technologies while maintaining stable operation in mission-critical areas.
  2. Improved speed and freedom of development with flexible infrastructure resources and pricing structure: No hardware procurement is necessary for infrastructure resource enhancement, allowing flexible response to increased workload or business scope expansion. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model, it can generate efficient investment effects in resource fluctuations.
  3. Seamless connection with diverse services” By linking with the open API platform “Resonatex,” it enables secure open API publishing at low cost and speed, allowing for advanced services through API connections with different industries and Fintech companies, thus advancing the financial industry.
  4. Provision of diverse services supporting stable system operation: To maintain customers’ IT governance for long-term use, BIPROGY provides not only system functions but also project management for reliable implementation and migration, staff training for in-house development, stable services during the operational phase, and enhancement services for regulatory changes.

Future Initiatives

BIPROGY will support the realization of customers’ “offensive” and “defensive” IT strategies by advancing and expanding the functions of “BankVision,” including stable service provision for legal revisions such as My Number, strengthening cybersecurity and BCP measures, and expanding API lineups. Through this, BIPROGY will accompany The Norinchukin Bank in their aim for the development of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries industries and response to environmental changes.

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Norbert Gehrke
Tokyo FinTech

Passionate about strategy & innovation across Asia. At home in Japan. Connector of people & ideas.