Working for Shinsei Bank #2 - IT Opportunities in 2005

Working for Shinsei Bank #2 - IT Opportunities in 2005

Shinsei Bank is an unusual mid-sized financial institution in Japan, in that it offers such a wide range of services, covering the Retail, Commercial, and Investment banking sectors. As such, the back office computing systems of the bank have to be flexible and responsive to change, at the same time as being extremely reliable and based on open standards.

Shinsei's IT group successfully did away with their "big iron" hardware, so that much of the bank's backbone now comprises standard Intel- and Cisco-type products, Oracle and similar industrial-grade software, and lots of Java and other flexible open systems technologies. Rather than the infrastructure, therefore, the bank's performance advantage largely revolves around the quality of its people and how they can come up with services delivery solutions in just days rather than the months or years experienced by their much larger competitors.

Indeed, talented people are the key ingredient at Shinsei, and the working environment shows that. The Meguro computing center features lots of modernized open space and meeting areas, which at most hours of the day are full of relatively young, international, and highly competent managers and engineers who are architecting new solutions, managing existing ones, and generally getting the job done. The atmosphere is almost collegiate, and staff clearly enjoy their job. In some banks I've been to, the IT back offices are as quiet as a morgue - with an accompanying death of creativity and enthusiasm to go with it. Shinsei is definitely not one of these.

Shinsei's need for staff continues to grow, in no short part due to the success of its M&A activities, coupled with rapid expansion of its retail banking operations. As such, it has ongoing needs both in regular support and maintenance, and also in services and product development. If you see something here you are interested in, please understand that technical and language competence are key requisites to working for the bank.

If you're not fluent yet, either as a Japanese or non-Japanese, be ready for a polite "no" to job enquiries. Shinsei is very much a Japanese bank, despite it's foreign CEO and a number of other senior managers. Because of this, the company highly values bilingual and bicultural skills and wants staff who can bridge foreign best-of-class technology with Japanese best-of-class competence and service.

Some of the open positions at Shinsei at present can be found at:
http://www.daijob.com/dj4/ja/companyjoblist.jsp?cid=2134831383

1. Improvement Manager of Customer Service at Call Centre

- Researching customer needs to improve services and putting them into practice

- Managing and supervising the staff performance at Call Centre

- Instructing and fostering supervisors and operators

2. Network Engineer

- Building and managing LAN/WAN, internet/VPN and telephony system

- Fixing problems and managing backups for above-mentioned systems

- Performance tuning and capacity planning for production systems

3. Call Centre Securities Manager

- Managing investment trust and securities agency tasks

- Managing internal administration

- Securing compliance when liaising with customers

4. Project Manager
- Managing projects related to developing and maintaining finance
application systems

5. Line manager for Administration Affairs

- Designing, managing, supervising and training back office operations and staff development, to take the bank to the next level of efficiency

6. Database Engineer

- Supporting and building databases for internet banking in-house operations

- Building and managing databases

- Backing up, managing and planning recovery of databases