- Integrated Report 2024
- Message from the CEO
- Message from the COO
- Message from the CFO - financial strategy
- Roundtable Discussion among Outside Directors
- Our Vision for a 2030
- New Medium-term Management Plan
- Global Business: A Decade of Tackling Challenges
- The Transformation of Saison Fundex Corporation
- CSDX Strategy
- Human Resource Strategy・Human Resource
CSDX Strategy
FY2023 was a year in which both the in-house development organization
and the areas within in-house development expanded. The in-house development teams have expanded to around 150 people, and they are increasingly involved in not only front-end development but also back-end core systems. In addition to the flexibility unique to in-house development, system construction costs are kept to less than half of what they would be if the work were outsourced, contributing to improved profit margins for each business. Even as the scale expands, we have been able to maintain a balance among quality, robustness, and speed. Recently, there have been many cases where people have said, “listening to Credit Saison’s story feels just like listening to a discussion about development at a start-up or SaaS company.” The term “Bimodal IT” is the concept of “Mode 1,” which emphasizes safety and accuracy, and “Mode 2,” which emphasizes agility and speed. These are both important values, but they often tend to conflict with each other. At Credit Saison, we aim to create an organization that can maximize the “HRT Principles” and turn this difference into a strength.
With regard to developing digital human resources, we offer two courses: an engineer course and a data scientist course. Whether it is a
career-track employee who has volunteered for a recruitment posting and is aiming to reskill themselves or a new employee with a digital technology background who is aiming to acquire skills, we have established a system where mid-career professionals provide support as mentors, in addition to implementing our own education program created with the cooperation of an educational company.
From now on, to link the power of in-house development more broadly to the strengthening of business competitiveness, it is necessary to have knowledge related to existing systems and operations that have so far been developed and maintained by the information systems department in conjunction with vendors. Suppose the knowledge of the information systems department and the in-house development teams is combined. In that case, there will be no area where in-house development is impossible, and all businesses and operations should become more efficient, labor-saving, and faster. “Can we really create our own systems for such areas?” We would like to aim to become a company that will surprise people in such a way.
Results and retrospective overview of FY2023
In FY2023, the digital department took the lead in reviewing and improving business processes with the aim of achieving complete digitalization of the business process. We interviewed teams
of individual business sections and divisions about the “ideal state that should be achieved,” and we have been working on automating data processing and building workflows to achieve this. Until recently, more than 300 cases had been submitted, and
if we can automate these, we expect to see a reduction of more than 200,000 hours per year.
We are also actively working to develop digital human resources in order to achieve “DX by all Group employees.” This fiscal year, we are newly building a basic course to standardize the skills for extracting data from databases. We will make it possible for any employee to extract data that was previously left to the IT department and select experts. Also, initiatives launched last fiscal year to practice in-house development using low-code tools by personnel belonging to the business divisions are also steadily beginning to yield results, with mechanisms for process management and automation of accounting processes being achieved.
Not only is there a top-down approach to digitization based on management strategies and business challenges, but also initiatives have been established to digitize the manual and personalized work that is scattered across the front lines in a bottom-up fashion. A system is steadily being created to transform operations from various directions.
No-code and low-code tool use
CSViz, where participants proposed issues in their own departments
to executive officers
(Credit Saison Visualization)
We are expanding the provision of reskilling for employees with the aim of improving operational efficiency through the use of no-code and low-code tools.
The first class of students to graduate from the “Citizen Data Scientist Course,” an in-house training program that began in FY2023, graduated in March. An event was held in which participants from a wide range of areas, such as call centers and debt management departments, created dashboards to solve issues in their own departments and presented them to executive officers. This event was also streamed online for employees, and it was a great success, with the best video being chosen by a vote from the approximately 200 employees who watched it and the executive officers. The survey results showed that it was a valuable opportunity to understand the challenges faced by other departments, and that there was much enthusiasm for taking on the challenges in the next term. This term, we will continue to enrich the content of the program and strive to develop citizen developers.
This fall, we will also begin a new certification system, a learning program focusing on extraction skills specifically for internal data. We will increase the digital literacy of the entire company even more than before, and work to further improve operational efficiency.
Generative AI use
In our efforts to utilize generative AI, which we have been focusing on since 2023, we offer
three in-house developed services that all employees can use: our own ChatGPT specifically for
internal purposes, an in-house Slack chatbot for inquiries, and a system that prepares minutes of
meetings.
The in-house Slack chatbot “FAQ Assist-kun” allows employees to send questions about internal
matters via Slack, which are then answered by generative AI using a RAG*1 system. Because
generative AI has the risk of hallucination (generating incorrect information), we are preventing this
problem by incorporating the human-in-the-loop*2 approach, where the person responsible for the
AI response checks the answers before returning them to the questioner. In addition, there is the
option to skip the confirmation of the department in charge and obtain an AI response directly,
enabling employees to use these options to quickly and efficiently acquire internal information.
The use of generative AI is an extremely important factor in the growth and strengthening of
corporate competitiveness. We will continue to use generative AI technology to improve CX as
well as EX, and provide better services and value.
*1 RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A technology that improves the accuracy of the answers generated by AI by combining external information searches, such as internal company data
*2 Human-in-the-Loop
To deliberately involve humans in some of the system’s decisions and controls
