Oracle today announced that Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has moved its retail brokerage accounting system, THE STAR, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region to scale the offering and help ensure maximum availability. THE STAR provides comprehensive back-office support to more than 70 brokerage firms and banks that manage hundreds of millions of trades a day.

To support its growth strategy while maintaining complete control over its data and financial governance, NRI is modernizing its mission-critical back-office solutions for brokerage firms with OCI Dedicated Region. NRI’s THE STAR enables brokerage firms and banks in Japan to conduct core operations such as setting up accounts, placing trades, settling trades, conducting compliance checks, reporting on sales, and financial accounting. For brokerage firms trading in real-time, speed and response time are critical for all financial processes, and THE STAR service must therefore be stable, reliable, and robust. The migration of THE STAR follows the successful implementations of OCI Dedicated Region in NRI’s Tokyo and Osaka data centers. NRI now runs three of their most critical applications on OCI Dedicated Regions: BESTWAY, T-STAR, and THE STAR.

“With a proven track record of moving our BESTWAY and T-STAR applications to OCI Dedicated Region, we have been able to build a secure, 24/7 platform that has enabled us to also move THE STAR applications to the cloud, while maintaining a high level of financial governance and regulatory compliance,” said Noriyuki Takeda, senior managing director and division deputy manager, Brokerage Solutions, NRI. “By further leveraging a wide range of cloud services and tools provided by Oracle, we will keep improving the business value for our financial services customers.”

OCI Dedicated Region delivers a fully managed cloud region that brings Oracle’s complete portfolio of public cloud services, including Oracle Exadata Database Service, to NRI in their data center. With the advanced security of OCI and high performance of Oracle Exadata Database Service, NRI is able to meet its security, performance and availability requirements and maintain complete control over its data and financial governance. To achieve real-time database replication in case of service disruption, NRI uses Oracle Data Guard to meet its disaster recovery requirements and maximize service availability for any database in case of region failures. By conducting maintenance in the cloud and verification in a production environment, NRI operates THE STAR platform around-the-clock enabling it to switch between the two production sites built in NRI’s data centers in Tokyo and Osaka during weekdays and weekends.

As part of the migration of THE STAR, NRI uses Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) to upgrade its applications and quickly respond to customer needs and industry regulations. Recent enhancements to OKE, such as the introduction of serverless Kubernetes with virtual nodes, enables NRI to improve developer productivity and accelerate innovation. In the near future, NRI also plans to use Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle APEX to accelerate the development and management of applications and databases.

“The financial services industry is one of the most demanding in terms of regulation and security, and financial transactions require high-performance processing and architectures that enable stable operations,” said Jae Evans, global chief information officer and executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “With OCI Dedicated Region, NRI can continue to deliver greater business value to its customers faster and easier than ever before, while maintaining stringent levels of control and governance. We are committed to helping NRI continue to advance its financial platform strategy.”