Hokkoku FHD develops next-generation core banking system using multi-cloud

Hokkoku Financial Holdings has started development of a next-generation core banking system using a multi-cloud environment.

In January 2023, Hokkoku FHD started examining a project aimed at building a next-generation regional digital platform equipped with financial services through full cloud adoption. While steadily advancing development of internet banking services for individuals (already released) and corporations (scheduled for release in spring 2024), Hokkoku FHD has now embarked on developing the next-generation core banking system that will be the core of the next-generation regional digital platform. To accelerate the realization of higher-quality financial services and more efficient bank management, Hokkoku FHD will develop the next-generation core banking system to enable operations in a multi-cloud environment.

Extremely high availability is emphasized for financial systems, and adopting a multi-cloud architecture leveraging multiple public clouds (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) is expected to dramatically improve availability. In the event of a cloud outage, switching the operating cloud allows quick service restoration.

• Flexibility, reliability: If one cloud service becomes unavailable, operations can be switched to the other cloud to ensure business continuity. IT resources can also be scaled swiftly as needed to accommodate business or environmental changes.
• Cost reduction: Paying only for the IT resources used enables reducing excessive investments and maintenance costs.
• Innovation: Easily adopting the latest technologies and services facilitates creating new services and business models that meet customer needs.

By adopting the latest technologies, moving away from Windows and Cobol, and truly becoming cloud native, tremendous productivity improvements can be expected, enabling the provision of services to customers in a much shorter timeframe. Unifying development skills for core banking, internet banking, card systems etc. will enable development by one team from front-end to back-end systems, also leading to lower development costs.

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