Financial Services Agency of the Japanese Government: Achieving more effective work-flow by eliminating mundane, laborious tasks
About Financial Services Agency
The Financial Services Agency is a Japanese government agency and a regulator for the country's financial services industry. It is responsible for ensuring the industry's stability and integrity, protecting depositors, insurance policyholders and securities investors, implementing financial policies, regulating the financial markets, and overseeing securities transactions.
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Contact usAbout Densan System Co., Ltd
Densan System is an information technology and services company, delivering consulting services and solutions in data processing, systems integration, software development, and payment acceptance and settlement. The company was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in Gifu, Japan.
To ease the process of scheduling council meetings, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) developed its own web scheduling application. By deploying the application on Google Cloud, FSA has reduced hours spent on manual scheduling and maintaining the application, while still driving security with Google Cloud Armor.
Google Cloud results
- Minimize administrative burden when improving the performance of the scheduling application through fully managed platform-as-a-service tools
- Defend against external attacks and enhance security with Google Cloud Armor
- Reduce time spent on manually scheduling meetings from 1 to 2 hours per council meeting to nearly 0
Reduces time spent on council meeting scheduling drastically
As a Japanese government agency and a regulator for the country's financial services industry, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) is responsible for ensuring the industry's stability and integrity. Thus, it often conducts several deliberative council meetings with third-party academics and practitioners. Whenever a meeting was held, a scheduling sheet would be sent to participants, with the meeting date selected by creating a response file from their preferred dates.
"The number of committee members who participate in these meetings is between 10 to 15. As each member has a different way of filling up the sheet, automating the calculation to come up with the right date can be difficult. In addition, adjusting the schedule was time-consuming, which includes sending reminders to those who did not key in their responses on the scheduling sheet. The people who took part in multiple committees also had to do double work filling in their schedule separately for each committee's scheduling sheet. To eliminate these hassles, I decided to create a scheduling application," says Masaki Hasegawa, Chief of the General Affairs Division, Planning and Markets Bureau in FSA.
Due to the sensitive data found in personal information and schedules, scheduling tools that do not meet the security requirements of the FSA cannot be used. As one of the founders of this initiative, Hasegawa recalls that young staff volunteers would develop their own application to circumvent these issues.
"The Financial Services Agency has a programme, known as Open Policy Lab, that allows employees to propose policies. Those who want to be part of this initiative can devote part of their working hours to conduct surveys, research, and development for improving the financial administration process," says Hasegawa. "We decided to use this programme to launch a project that aims to improve the efficiency of scheduling work at the Financial Services Agency and free up staff time for more essential work."
Developing the scheduling application with Google Cloud
The project began at the end of 2019. Some members in the team, including Hasegawa, had some experience. In the past they took part in a project to digitize their conference rooms reservation, they also had prior programming experience. They applied this knowledge into creating a prototype for the scheduling application. By April 2021, the team was able to develop a functioning application.
"Cloud services used by the government must be certified and registered with Information System Security Management and Assessment Program (ISMAP), a security evaluation system for government information systems operated by the National Cyber Security Center (NISC). After narrowing down the candidates by price and after sales support, we decided to use Google Cloud after going through the procurement process."
—Kazutaka Sato, Cabinet Office Secretary, Market Division, Planning and Markets Bureau, FSAYet, the team encountered challenges with integrating the application within the infrastructure. In particular, it wanted to authorize third-party access for external users, so committee members and councils can share their preferred slots for deliberative councils. To overcome the integration issue, FSA decided to turn to the cloud.
"Cloud services used by the Japanese government must be certified and registered with Information System Security Management and Assessment Program (ISMAP), a security evaluation system for government information systems operated by the National Cyber Security Center (NISC). After narrowing down the candidates by price and after sales support, we decided to use Google Cloud after going through the procurement process," says Kazutaka Sato, Cabinet Office Secretary, Market Division, Planning and Markets Bureau for FSA. "Many members were already using Google services such as Gmail and were familiar with their operation. In addition, I was impressed by the flexible and thoughtful technical support provided by Densan System Co., Ltd., an authorized sales agent, even though I had no knowledge of cloud operations."
Reduce staff burden with fully managed services
When Hasegawa and the team deployed the scheduling application on Google Cloud, one priority was to minimize its maintenance and operation, so as not to disrupt the daily responsibilities of its team members.
"Security, which was of utmost importance, was also difficult to oversee. The application was hosted on a network outside the office, and it was also a tool that was used by external parties, so installing a web application firewall was essential. Therefore, we introduced Google Cloud Armor. With the help of the IT department and third-party experts, we checked the vulnerabilities by putting these through security stress tests."
—Kazutaka Sato, Cabinet Office Secretary, Market Division, Planning and Markets Bureau, FSA"For the scheduling application, we use fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products such as App Engine and Cloud SQL to minimize the administrative burden, such as scaling and daily maintenance," says Hasegawa.
"Security, which was of utmost importance, was also difficult to oversee. The application was hosted on a network outside the office, and it was also a tool that was used by external parties, so installing a web application firewall was essential. Therefore, we introduced Google Cloud Armor. With the help of the IT department and third-party experts, we checked the vulnerabilities by putting these through security stress tests," says Sato.
"Many employees have told us that they have reduced the time spent on putting together schedule sheets, which used to take one to two hours, to almost zero, allowing them to concentrate on more strategic work. In addition to reducing the time required for integrating the application within the infrastructure, there are other benefits to using this scheduling application, such as the simple user interface that allows tap input from a smartphone, faster responses from attendees and smoother scheduling."
—Kazutaka Sato, Cabinet Office Secretary, Market Division, Planning and Markets Bureau, FSA"In addition, we use Cloud Identity to manage account permissions. And by designing the app so that you don't have to enter the names of committee members or council, we made sure that data loss does not take place even in the event of an infringement. For security, we also had ample support from the Google Cloud team and Densan, with them giving us plenty of advice."
Ayuko Kamiya, Risk Analysis Division, Policy Bureau of FSA, also explains how FSA is addressing potential security gaps. "We have prepared a workflow for when an incident occurs in advance, and established a process so that when a problem occurs, a report is promptly sent to the right team, who can remediate the issue." As a result, the scheduling application was fully operational by December 2021.
Kamiya also adds that the results have been excellent, with many prior issues, such as the time-consuming process of manually setting up schedules, being resolved.
"Many employees have told us that they have reduced the time spent on putting together schedule sheets, which used to take one to two hours, to almost zero, allowing them to concentrate on more strategic work," says Kamiya. "In addition to reducing the time required for manually arranging the meeting dates, there are other benefits to using this scheduling application, such as the simple user interface that allows tap input from a smartphone, faster responses from attendees and smoother scheduling."
Moreover, the scheduling application was both well-received within and outside the agency, with the Cabinet Secretariat awarding the team for improving operational efficiency throughout the company. "FSA has been awarded the Business Review Special Award as part of the Work-life Balance Award, as well as commended for focusing on easing and coordinating the schedules of council members, which is a routine task for many ministries and departments."
The scheduling application has become an indispensable tool for FSA, and the team plans to continue improving the application's functionality and increase the number of users. "There are many ministries and agencies in Kasumigaseki (the area of Japanese government center) that have similar problems, so I think it is feasible for other agencies and teams to implement this app," says Sato. "Through this initiative, I also learned about implementing applications on the cloud, so I would like to further improve the application for driving new initiatives in the future."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usAbout Financial Services Agency
The Financial Services Agency is a Japanese government agency and a regulator for the country's financial services industry. It is responsible for ensuring the industry's stability and integrity, protecting depositors, insurance policyholders and securities investors, implementing financial policies, regulating the financial markets, and overseeing securities transactions.
About Densan System Co., Ltd
Densan System is an information technology and services company, delivering consulting services and solutions in data processing, systems integration, software development, and payment acceptance and settlement. The company was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in Gifu, Japan.