SBI Securities migrates domestic online trading system to AWS
SBI Securities has migrated its online trading system for domestic equities to the AWS Cloud. SBI Securities has over 12 million total securities accounts, the largest in Japan, and with this migration, it has become the first domestic securities firm to execute over 2 trillion yen in daily domestic equity trades on AWS.
Furthermore, by implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) utilizing the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), which enables infrastructure to be built and managed through code and automated for agility and reliability, SBI Securities can now expand capacity in less than half the time compared to on-premises infrastructure, enabling it to handle surges in equity trading demand.
SBI Securities plans to gradually migrate its other business systems to the AWS Cloud by 2026, and to accelerate and streamline the migration process for development tasks, it is considering utilizing Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers high-performance foundation models (FMs) accessible via a single API along with a comprehensive set of capabilities required for building generative AI applications.
In November 2022, the Japanese government announced a fundamental expansion and perpetuation of the NISA program (tax-exempt small investment program) to shift more than half of household financial assets from savings into investments, realizing a virtuous cycle of growth and income from assets. Under this policy, SBI Securities announced the first elimination of domestic equity trading commissions in Japan to promote customer investment. To accommodate its rapidly expanding customer base, SBI Securities decided to build a trading system on AWS offering shorter capacity expansion timeframes along with high scalability and flexibility. In migrating its trading system to AWS, SBI Securities utilized the IT Transformation Package 2.0 for FIN, a cloud migration assistance program offered by AWS at no cost, realizing significant migration cost reductions.
**Shorter Capacity Expansion Timeframes** The AWS CDK is an open-source software development framework that defines cloud infrastructure as code and provisions it through AWS CloudFormation, enabling infrastructure like networks, servers, and databases to be treated as code. SBI Securities is utilizing the AWS CDK to build equity trading and other mission-critical systems as code. This has allowed SBI Securities to significantly accelerate implementation speed in the AWS environment compared to manually configuring cloud infrastructure, while improving release and operational quality. Additionally, SBI Securities can now expand capacity in less than half the time compared to on-premises infrastructure to handle surges in trading accounts or equity trading demand.
Redundant Configuration for Stable Trading
By using multiple Availability Zones (AZs) in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, SBI Securities has built a highly scalable and flexible trading system that achieves high availability while ensuring low latency, handling around 100 million daily access requests to its trading site and processing approximately 3.6 million trades (orders) per day. Fault injection is a testing method used to proactively identify and mitigate potential system failures or weaknesses in software applications, infrastructure, and networks. Previously, SBI Securities had to manually perform fault injection, consuming significant resources. By utilizing the AWS Fault Injection Service (AWS FIS), SBI Securities can now automatically validate high availability designs by simulating failures across Availability Zones, such as how the system responds to unexpected outages, while reducing the human resources and time required for fault injection. Additionally, SBI Securities is using AWS Distributed Load Testing, an AWS solution for simulating large-scale loads like traffic surges, to automatically validate infrastructure scalability in handling customer demand spikes.
Secure Private Connections Between SBI Group Companies
In 2022, SBI Holdings, Inc. selected AWS as its recommended cloud provider, actively promoting AWS adoption across SBI Group companies. Through AWS PrivateLink, which establishes connections between a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS services, SBI Securities has enabled secure private connections between SBI Group entities like SBI Sumishin Net Bank and Osaka Digital Exchange Co, as well as partner companies outside the group, generating synergies.
AWS Japan Investments
In January 2024, AWS announced plans to invest 226 billion yen in domestic cloud infrastructure in Japan by 2027 to meet growing customer demand for cloud services. According to a report on the economic impact AWS brings to Japan, this investment plan is estimated to contribute 5.57 trillion yen to Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) and sustain an annual average of more than 30,500 jobs domestically. AWS has already invested 1.51 trillion yen in Japan from 2011 to 2022, and its total investment in domestic cloud infrastructure is expected to reach approximately 3.77 trillion yen by 2027.
Please follow us to read more about Finance & FinTech in Japan, like hundreds of readers do every day. We invite you to also register for our short weekly digest, the “Japan FinTech Observer”, on Medium or on LinkedIn. Our global Finance & FinTech Podcast, “eXponential Finance” is also available through its own LinkedIn newsletter, or via our Podcast Page.
Should you live in Tokyo, or just pass through, please also join our meetup. In any case, our YouTube channel and LinkedIn page are there for you as well.
