Celent's Eiichiro Yanagawa to speak on open API banking at the 2018 Banking Forum in Jakarta & Bangkok

He will talk about the global trends on open banking and Japanese banks' API efforts.

Celent's Eiichiro Yanagawa will be a speaker and panelist at the Jakarta (March 21) and Bangkok (May 29) legs of the 2018 Retail Banking Forum.

Eiichiro Yanagawa is a senior analyst with Celent's Asian Financial Services group and is based in Tokyo. His research focuses on IT strategy issues in the Japanese and Asian banking and financial industries.

The brief interview below reveals Eiichiro’s background, business philosophies, and more.

What are your previous experiences and positions held that contributed to who you are as a financial services expert today?
Prior to joining Celent, I was the chief manager of the Financial Global Solutions Division and the Regional Bank Financial Solutions Division at NEC Corporation in Tokyo. I was responsible for developing NEC’s core banking system, strategic marketing planning, and consulting on financial institution systems.

Prior to that, I was the general manager of the Financial Services Division at NEC Corporation of America in New York. In this role, I worked on the development of IT strategy and advised clients, mainly Japanese financial institutions, on outsourcing and selection of software packages.

I earned my MBA at Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of Commerce and Management.

What are your key business philosophies?
We, Celent, pride ourselves on our independent coverage, our informed analysts, our interaction with clients, and our in-depth research, which fast-tracks our custom consulting. A formula that has worked for us since our inception.

Can you give us a glimpse of what you will share at the ABF Retail Banking Forum in Jakarta and Bangkok?
In around 2015, it has been studied in Japan to disclose the functions of banks as Web API (eg. balance inquiry etc.) and to enable the use of those functions by other companies. The revised Banking Act was enacted in May 2017. Regarding the cooperation between banks and Fintech companies using the API, the legal system was improved and a path to the widespread adoption of bank APIs has come up.

As the full-scale utilization of banking APIs become more active, new services will be generated one after another through the cooperation among the companies across the industries.

In this session, I will discuss global trends in open API and open banking, Japan's current situation on open API, and the path to open banking and open innovation.

The discussion will include the following points: