TOKYO—April 23, 2024— Amazon Web Services (AWS) Japan, an Amazon.com company, today announced that SBI SECURITIES Co., Ltd. (SBI Securities), the largest stock brokerage in Japan by account numbers, has completed the full migration of its online trading system, mobile applications, and multifactor authentication systems to AWS. With AWS, SBI Securities can scale workloads 50% faster compared to using on-premises infrastructure, easily handling more than 12 million retail investor accounts and processing over JPY 2 trillion in daily stock trading transactions on the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud – a first for AWS Japan. SBI Securities plans to migrate all business applications, including its and international stocks and bond systems, to AWS by 2026. SBI Securities is also exploring the use of Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies via a single API and a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications, to automate the production of code essential to migration, freeing up developers' time to focus on higher-value tasks.
SBI Securities’ efforts are in line with the changes in the Japanese financial market following the Japanese government’s initiative in 2022 to introduce a tax-free plan called “NISA (Nippon Individual Savings Account) ” to encourage investing over saving to drive wealth creation. To support customers under this new policy that encourages the large increase of personal wealth management environment, SBI Securities announced it will be the first Japanese securities brokerage to offer commission-free trading on Japanese stocks, aiming to boost investment by its customers. SBI Securities decided to migrate its online trading systems on AWS to shorten the time required for capacity expansion and ensure flexibility to accommodate the rapid growth of number of accounts, while also significantly reducing the cost of migration by leveraging the IT Transformation Package 2.0 for FIN, a cloud migration assistance program offered free of charge by AWS.
SBI Securities uses the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), an open-source software development framework to improve the efficiency of migrating and managing complex infrastructure. This service allows brokerages like SBI Securities to treat their network configurations, servers, databases, and other infrastructure in code. Using CDK, SBI Securities has built its cloud-based stock trading environments and other mission critical systems with code to simplify configuring cloud infrastructure. This has enabled SBI Securities to significantly accelerate the speed of deploying the environment on AWS compared to manually configurating cloud infrastructure, improve the quality of operations, and scale capacity is in less than half of the time compared to on-premise infrastructure to manage spikes in stock trading demand.
Mitigating Downtime Risks
SBI Securities leveraged multiple availability zones (AZs) in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region to achieve high availability and low latency while processing over 100 million simultaneous site logins and 3.6 million transactions daily. Previously, SBI Securities conducted manual Fault Injection Testing (FIT) which was resource-intensive. FIT is a testing methodology used in the financial services industry to proactively identify and mitigate potential system failures or weaknesses in software applications, infrastructure, or networks. By using AWS’s Fault Injection Service to simulate availability zone failures, SBI Securities can now automatically test how its systems handle unexpected outages, verifying they are designed for high availability. This has enabled SBI Securities to reduce FIT resources and time with the confidence that its services will continue running smoothly for customers. SBI Securities is also using AWS Distributed Load Testing to validate that its infrastructure can scale to meet spikes in customer demand by mimicking sudden surges in traffic.
SBI Establishes Secure Private Connections Between SBI Group Companies
SBI Holdings, the parent company of SBI Securities, cemented its relationship with AWS as its preferred cloud provider in 2022. This collaboration extends across the SBI Group, with various subsidiaries actively utilizing AWS services. Specifically, SBI Securities has leveraged AWS PrivateLink to forge connections between its virtual private cloud (VPC) and AWS services. By doing so, SBI Securities facilitates seamless connectivity not only within the SBI Group, including entities such as Shinsei Bank Limited, Osaka Digital Exchange Co., Ltd., but also with its partner companies, fostering synergies and enhancing operational efficiency.
"Offering commission-free trading on Japanese stocks by SBI Securities and NISA drove substantial growth in accounts opened and trading volume at SBI Securities," said Masato Takamura, Representative Director & President. "We expect further account and volume growth as the savings-to-investment shift accelerates. SBI Securities recognizes AWS's resilience and agility as vital to our growth. By migrating from on-premise to AWS, we can accelerate the delivery of services and reduce costs. We remain committed to providing a safe and robust platform to assist individual investors in building wealth."
“We’re proud to provide technology to support the rapid evolution of the financial services sector in Japan,” said Scott Mullins, Managing Director and General Manager of Worldwide Financial Services for AWS. “SBI Securities has built an industry-leading trading solution entirely on AWS by working backwards from existing investment challenges and focusing on customer benefits to make investing easy and fruitful. We look forward to continuing to collaboration with SBI Securities to create enduring customer experiences and drive with the latest generative AI solutions.”
AWS announced a plan to invest JPY 2.26 trillion investment into cloud infrastructure in Japan across two AWS Regions located in Tokyo and Osaka by 2027. This new investment will help accelerate the domestic adoption of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), boost revenues across industries through digital transformation, and upskill the digital workforce in Japan. AWS’s committed investment is estimated to contribute 5.57 trillion yen to Japan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and generate 30,500 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in local Japanese businesses. Having already invested 1.51 trillion yen in Japan from 2011 to 2022, AWS’s total investment into cloud infrastructure in the country by 2027 will be approximately 3.77 trillion yen.
About Amazon Web Services Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com