Merging the old NRI with Nomura Computer Systems (1988)

What it means to connect two unlike companies

To read the 1988 merger only as a far-sighted fusion of research and IT is to bend it too far toward a story written afterwards. What was joined at the moment of merger were two companies whose cultures and staff were different and whose customers merely overlapped in the Nomura group and the financial sector. Putting an organization that sells paper reports and an organization that sells machine time into a single legal entity guaranteed nothing about their fitting together. In fact it took time to bind researchers and engineers, and the form in which a single company took a job end to end did not settle until several years after the merger.

What produced NRI’s distinctive position was less the binding itself than the fact that Nomura Computer Systems had already built the shared-utility platform that underpins financial IT. Because problems found in research could be implemented on that platform by the same firm, NRI could take on territory that neither reports alone nor machine time alone could reach. The 1988 decision to make two companies one was not flashy diversification but the connecting of functions that already existed separately inside the group. That unglamorous connection became the skeleton supporting the profit structure that followed.