Saga Bank Ltd. launched a new banking app in 2023 with the aim of improving customer convenience and streamlining operations. The app provides a function for changing customer addresses and other information, but the process of sending emails to notify completion was carried out manually, resulting in delays in notifications and a heavy workload for staff.
The bank therefore introduced HULFT Square, a cloud-based data integration platform (iPaaS), and built a system to seamlessly data integration between its accounting system, its own system, and the system for sending emails to customers. By automating email sending, the bank saw the potential for further business improvements using data integration with HULFT Square.
Customer Issues
When adding new features to the banking app, the company wanted to automate the process of sending emails to customers and improve operational efficiency.
Benefits of implementation
HULFT Square
High operability and
generous support By
Built in a short time
Multiple Systems
Seamless collaboration
Sending email
automation Achieve
Secure communication with the outside world
Data Sharing etc.
Banking
Further improvements underway
Background: Automating email sending is an urgent need as new banking app features are added.
Saga Bank is a community-based bank with 103 branches, primarily in Saga Prefecture, but also in Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Tokyo. Founded in 1882 and taking on its current name in 1955, the bank celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2025 by formulating its 18th three-year medium-term management plan. In the plan, the bank defines its vision as "In this town, with you... A banking group that connects the community, connects people, and creates a prosperous future for the region." It cites the fusion of "digital" and "analog" technologies to improve customer convenience and provide high-quality services as a means to achieve sustainable development of the local community and economy. This policy is a continuation of the DX strategy outlined in the previous 17th medium-term management plan.
In fact, the bank had already been actively promoting customer-facing and internal digital transformation, led by the IT Department. One of its major initiatives was the renewal of its existing banking app in December 2023, when it launched the new "Sagin App." This banking app allows customers to easily and safely open new accounts, check balances, and check deposit and withdrawal details from their smartphones, greatly improving customer convenience.
Mr. Hiroaki Hayashida
The bank is constantly adding new features to the Sagin app, aiming to eventually enable all banking transactions to be completed via the app. One of these features is the ability to change information such as addresses, but because the completion notification emails were sent to customers manually, delays in notifications and the workload on staff were an issue. Hiroaki Hayashida, Deputy General Manager of the IT Management Department, reflects on the situation as follows:
"After checking the identification documents, making sure there are no errors in the email address, and writing and sending a standard email takes 15 to 30 minutes per email. To do this 30 to 50 times a day, we had to allocate one or two staff members," says Hayashida.
Implemented HULFT Square: High operability and comprehensive support enable rapid system development
By data integration the email sending system with accounting systems and other systems, the bank wanted to automate email notifications to customers. Initially, the bank considered developing a system from scratch to achieve this, but concerns about the length of development time and the dependency on individual skills led them to ultimately select HULFT Square. Regarding the key points they evaluated, Hayashida said:
"First of all, the most important point was that we could effectively utilize the SaaS email sending system used by the Sagin app and securely link it to our accounting system without having to sign up for a new email sending service. Also, since our bank was already using DataSpider Servista and HULFT, we evaluated HULFT Square, also from Saison Technology, because it offers similar operability and can be developed without coding, keeping costs down, and because it can easily link using the same traditional method once a connection environment with Amazon Web Services is established. In addition, it comes with components that can link with a wide variety of systems, such as Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, which could be used to expand our business in the future, which was also appealing," says Hayashida.
Yasuhiko Ureshino of the IT Management Department, who was in charge of creating the business logic during the actual construction work, said that although it was his first time using HULFT Square, he was able to use it without any problems.
Mr. Yasuhiko Ureshino
"I had only received a little training on DataSpider before, but I was able to use HULFT Square easily without any special study, as it is intuitive to use. Also, Saison Technology provided comprehensive support from the PoC (Proof of Concept) stage, and we were able to resolve any questions we had during the Q&A sessions at our biweekly meetings, and we were able to work with the person in charge as we built the system, which was a great help during development," says Ureshino.
As a result, the construction work, which was estimated to take three to four months if developed from scratch, was completed in just under one month. After testing, the new email sending system was put into operation in August 2024.
Effect: Seamless data integration enables automated email sending
The bank used HULFT Square to create a system that seamlessly data integration between its accounting system, its own system, and its email transmission system. The resulting flow is as follows: First, when data such as address changes is registered using the new function "Notification Transactions" in the Sagin app, it is extracted by the accounting system and then transferred to HULFT Square 's storage via the bank's own system. This part of data integration is automated and seamlessly performed by HULFT.
The data transferred to HULFT Square is checked for consistency through regular batch processing, and if there are no problems, a completion notification is sent to the customer via the SaaS email sending system. Conversely, if there are any deficiencies, an alert is sent back to the bank's own system. A series of processes that were originally planned to be carried out manually have been automated and expedited by data integration with HULFT Square. Ureshino evaluates the results as follows:
"We've been able to fully automate the process whereby a person in charge checks the results of the data changes, creates an email, and then sends it to the customer after getting approval from the administrator. Even before the new function was implemented, we had feared that if the number of emails sent increased with the increase in users, it would eventually become impossible to handle the work manually, so this is a major success. Also, while we previously notified customers by mail or telephone, the creation of a system that completes the process digitally means that these notifications are no longer necessary. This also eliminates the risk of accidentally mailing an email to the wrong customer, and I think this has also had a major impact on the psychological pressure on bank employees," says Ureshino.
Mr. Yushin Sasaki
Meanwhile, Yushin Sasaki of the IT Management Department, who was involved in the construction work, spoke again about the benefits that HULFT Square has brought about in terms of development and operations.
"Thanks to HULFT Square, which allows for no-code development, we were able to significantly reduce the man-hours required for app testing. We conducted around 20 unit tests, but if we had developed it from scratch, we probably would have needed three to four times that. Our bank also uses Saison Technology's support services, which have been extremely helpful even since we started using the service. For example, when we contacted them about an error, we received an accurate response within just a few hours," says Sasaki.
Outlook: New business improvements are underway, further utilizing HULFT Square
"As the shift to multi-cloud computing accelerates, we believe the value of HULFT Square to our bank will continue to grow as it solves the issue of how to easily and securely connect data," says Ureshino.
As Ureshino says, the know-how gained from the implementation of HULFT Square is expected to be put to good use in a variety of areas of the bank's business. The automation of email sending made possible by the Sagin app can also be used for external email send in other areas of the bank's business, such as direct mail to customers. When a department wants to carry out a promotion, all it needs to do is prepare the data, and the rest is send the email automatically, making for quick and easy marketing activities.
On the other hand, Hayashida says that he wants to go beyond automating email sending and expand collaboration between various clouds, or between clouds and on-premises systems, to improve business operations.
For example, using the HULFT Square connector, we can share business data with our partners in Microsoft SharePoint, or build a system that links on-prem data with AWS, Azure, etc. There are many possible uses for HULFT Square. In fact, we have already built a system using Microsoft 365 SharePoint and HULFT Square to securely exchange customer information with the securities company that manages the fund wrap product we sell to our customers. In this way, we would like to make more and more use of HULFT Square as an indispensable tool for connecting data," says Hayashida.
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- Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.
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Saga Bank
- Head office address: 2-7-20 Tojin, Saga City, Saga Prefecture
- Established: March 9, 1882, July 11, 1955
- Capital: 16,062 million yen
- Number of employees: 1,160 (as of September 30, 2024)
- Business operations: Deposit services, lending services, securities investment services, domestic exchange services, foreign exchange services, corporate bond trusteeship and registration services, financial futures trading services, trust services, and related services
- The content of this case study is current as of the time of the interview. The content of this case study may change without notice.