Company history

In 1965 Nomura Securities carved its research department out into a separate company. Nomura Research Institute was Japan’s first serious private think tank — industry studies and economic forecasts sold to corporate clients — and the split served two purposes at once. It gave the brokerage an arm’s-length home for the investment research it fed to clients, insulated from the regulation and conflicts of interest that bind a securities house; and it let the group sell knowledge as a business in its own right, to an industrial base far beyond Nomura’s own customers. Nothing quite like it existed in Japan at the time, and a brokerage founding a research-only subsidiary had few precedents anywhere in the industry.

The following year the group set up a second company, Nomura Computing Center — later Nomura Computer Systems — to computerize securities operations. One sold paper; the other sold machine time. Their customers overlapped in the Nomura group and the wider financial sector, but the products and the cultures did not: an organization of researchers and an organization of operators and programmers ran on different evaluation systems and drew on different talent pools, and although they shared clients and sales routes they were managed almost independently. Japan’s IT industry then was dominated by manufacturer-affiliated system integrators and the in-house computing subsidiaries of banks and brokerages; holding a think tank and a systems house in the same group was unusual, and it laid — accidentally — the ground for what came later.

In January 1988 the old NRI and Nomura Computer Systems merged into the company that exists today. The trigger was demand: as financial institutions poured money into systems, they began looking for a counterparty that understood the business well enough to write the requirements. Now the research side could find an operational problem in the course of a study and the systems side could take the contract and build the answer. Neither selling reports nor selling machine time reached that territory alone; a single firm carrying a job from requirements definition through to post-launch operations was, in the Japanese market of the day, a rare thing to be able to buy.

Binding researchers and engineers into one company took years. What made it cohere was the shared-utility system — a single platform used jointly by multiple financial institutions — which Nomura Computer Systems had already built for brokerages and banks, and around which consulting and IT services could run in parallel. NRI grew two faces at once: an in-house integrator for the Nomura group, and an independent vendor selling shared platforms to outside financial institutions. Know-how sharpened on group work became the basis of the outside product; the operating scale won outside brought the group’s costs down. Keeping both inside one company, rather than splitting them into separate units, is what made them feed each other — and the financial IT operations business that would become the profit engine took its shape in those few years.

In December 2001 NRI listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The reason was structural rather than financial. A member of the Nomura group that also supplied shared platforms to competing banks and brokerages needed to not be seen as “Nomura’s internal company,” and needed the financial transparency to show that usage fees were set rationally. A shared platform carries several institutions on one base; any suspicion that its terms favour a particular shareholder stalls adoption outright. Staying inside the group would have capped how far the outside customer base could grow. Tellingly, the money raised went not into research capacity but into data centres and operating infrastructure — the first clear sign of the gap between what the name “Research Institute” promised and where the profits actually came from.

Fujinuma Akihisa became chairman and president in 2003 and handed over to Shimamoto Tadashi in June 2010. Across those years NRI shifted its weight decisively toward stock-type revenue — not the one-off income of contract development, but monthly operations and maintenance fees accumulated over multi-year terms, a structure far less hostage to the swings of individual projects. Extending an existing customer’s operating contract and widening its scope gradually carried less migration risk for the bank than a fresh build did, and the industry was entering a period in which holding long-term maintenance after the first wave of development decided which integrators earned a margin.

Consolidated revenue grew from $2.3B (¥253bn) in FY2004 to $3.5B (¥421bn) in FY2015, with operating margins running in the high teens — well above the sector average. Upstream consultants held the requirements; downstream operations earned the long money. The financial expertise ground out on Nomura group work — the detail of securities back offices and investment-trust processing — became the weapon for selling to regional banks, life insurers and asset managers, because a client that does not have to teach its vendor the business spends less defining it. While independent integrators sold man-months, NRI sold long-run services with domain knowledge baked in.

The gap between the name and the accounts persisted through the decade. Free research reports and economic forecasts in the press carried real publicity value while the bulk of the profit came from financial IT — research as the shop window, systems and operations as the earner. The company’s external self-description settled into the pairing of “consulting” and “IT solutions,” retaining the think-tank origin while the substance moved toward being a core IT vendor to financial institutions. That distance was not a weakness so much as the position itself: research gave NRI a source of domain authority no pure integrator could imitate, while the IT arm took on the implementation responsibility no pure think tank could carry.

Konomoto Shingo became president in 2016 and pushed the company’s self-definition outward: from a supplier of systems to financial institutions to a builder of “digital social capital,” arguing that Japanese firms would survive the era of digital capitalism only by creating economic and social value through shared data — a “digital commons.” It was an attempt to close, from the brand side, the long-standing distance between the “Research Institute” name and a profit base concentrated in financial IT. Repeating the phrase in public also reordered internal priorities, favouring work that took an industry-wide, infrastructural position over projects confined to a single bank. The numbers followed: revenue rose from $3.9B (¥425bn) with $537.5M (¥59bn) of operating profit in FY2016 to $5.3B (¥692bn) and $851M (¥112bn) in FY2022, lifting the operating margin past 16%.

In April 2023 Konomoto announced NRI Group Vision 2030 and the Mid-Term Management Plan 2025, built on four pillars: deepening the core, DX evolution (staged as DX 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0), a three-pole global structure adding North America to Japan and Australia, and advanced management of human capital and sustainability. The staging framework doubled as sales language — 1.0 replaces systems, 2.0 redesigns processes, 3.0 launches new businesses, each corresponding to a different deal size and engagement length. A management plan that works as an external communication tool is a very think-tank-descended thing to produce; the plan reads less as a set of financial targets than as a document updating who the company says it is. The global pillar was the sharpest admission in it — close to the first time since listing that the flip side of NRI’s domestic financial strength had been named in a plan.

Capital policy came forward at the same moment. In May 2023 the board approved a buyback of up to 20 million shares and $355.8M (¥50bn); on 29 March 2024 it cancelled 13,370,131 shares, cutting the share count from about 593 million to 580 million. Cancellation, rather than holding treasury stock, made the reduction permanent. Dividends rose in step, reaching ¥53 for FY2024. Full-year FY2024 showed revenue of $4.9B (¥737bn), operating profit of $794.7M (¥120bn), ROE of 19.9% and a payout ratio of 38.8% — a profile addressed to the capital market rather than to the traditional Japanese balance sheet. Yet overseas revenue stalled around 16%, and a contingent-consideration writedown at the Australian subsidiary bit into quarterly profit: the efficiency figures and the geographic ambition sat side by side, unreconciled. In June 2024 Konomoto handed the presidency to Yanagisawa Hanae — the first time the job went to someone from the corporate side rather than the technology track, and the first woman to hold it.