INSIGHTS

Please tell us a little about nCino and your role at the company in Japan?

My title is Regional VP Japan Customer Success but I’m involved in pretty much everything. I’m here to do whatever I can to make nCino successful in Japan and globally.

Although I began my career in New Zealand as a developer building banking solutions for 10 years, I’ve worked with customers all over the world including the U.S., France, Switzerland, the UK, Ireland, China and now Japan. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to be involved in project delivery, as well as product delivery. It’s exciting to be a part of a growing team in Japan. I’ve been here for almost two years now.

nCino is based in Wilmington, North Carolina in the U.S. We provide a comprehensive SaaS banking platform that enables banks and other financial institutions to onboard new clients, make loans and manage the entire loan life cycle, open deposit and other accounts, and manage regulatory compliance. AI and machine learning give our customers the ability to analyze, measure and manage credit risk, as well as enhance their ability to comply with regulatory requirements. We have more than 1,800 customers worldwide that include global corporate and investment banks, enterprise, regional and community banks, credit unions and independent mortgage banks.

Despite the robustness of our product, I don’t see ourselves as solely a tech company. What we do in essence is partner with financial institutions to transform their lending businesses, and embed a more agile and innovative mindset. This allows our customers to future proof their ability to evolve with the demands of the market – underpinned by our technology ecosystem.

Financial institutions value our perspective on transformation, banking, and technology adoption. Looking at business outcomes, we enable financial institutions to serve their business and individual customers more effectively and with a better experience, and therefore grow alongside their customers.

So your focus is outcomes. Tell us more.

Indeed. We help our customers to realize business outcomes by making sure they make full use of the nCino product. The before and after scenarios with nCino are very clear. We enable financial institutions to approve loans and provide cash in days, even hours, as opposed to weeks or months. This can be a matter of life or death for small businesses. Such stories are very powerful.

nCino has always excelled at telling customer stories. In Japan, we’re getting to the stage where our customers, like SMBC Trust Bank and Nomura Trust Bank, are sharing how nCino is delivering outcomes that are good for their customers as well as Japan’s economy. These stories are very visceral and inspiring. They’re not only good for our customers’ business. They instill a sense of pride and purpose in our team.

What challenges have you faced in Japan?

I received an offer to come to Japan while I was living in the UK and working for nCino in London. The ask was to implement a globally consistent approach with customers and help grow the business. Our leadership felt I had the requisite global experience and right disposition.

I think we’ve made great progress implementing global best practices in Japan, although there really is no finish line to global integration and culture-building. Whether big or small, regional organizations need to be engaged closely with their global colleagues.

For expats, however, becoming a part of the local team can be a challenge. It doesn’t matter what region one is in. My situation was made even more difficult because of COVID. I arrived here in January of 2022, and online meetings aren’t the best way to build trusted relationships.

But I think I’ve been able to gain acceptance, albeit gradually, by becoming a better listener. I studied Japanese in secondary school, so I could communicate somewhat, but a lot was still lost in translation. As I focused on improving my Japanese, I became a more attentive listener. I think the team realizes now that I’m not here to micro-manage them, but to mentor and share global knowledge for enabling our customers to succeed, which is essential for our own success.

Customer success requires customer participation. To what extent do Japanese banks understand customer success?

That’s a great question. Salesforce has been in Japan for close to 25 years, and they built their business on customer success, but the industry still has a lot of work to do. The concepts seem to be understood but they haven’t been put into practice.

We often kick off our engagements with customers agreeing on the need for partnership, an adoption mindset and ongoing innovation, but once we reach implementation, competing project priorities and old “on-prem technology purchase” habits can create a ceiling on this joint co-creation. This predicament is not unique to us in Japan. Customers everywhere are still learning how to participate in, and benefit from, the customer success model, which is truly based on partnership.

Customer success, of course, is about the SaaS provider enabling customers to derive maximum value from their product. We do this by changing the software model from a “sell, implement, and leave” model to one that sees the “go-live” as the starting line for the customer. We then support customers in gaining further value and realizing transformation from the platform as time passes. Customer success needs to be a journey for the customer, as well as the SaaS provider. It’s about realizing mutual success by iterating and innovating together.

On the whole, I have found it’s much easier to have conversations about partnership or the customer success model with European customers than with Japanese customers, who prefer to know what they are getting before they get it, and once they get it, they’re done. So far, my experience has been that our projects in Japan have been based on more of a linear manufacturing mindset than an agile software mindset.

I find this an incredible juxtaposition given how high-tech and innovative Japan appears to the outsider. If you take a walk around Tokyo and you see the architecture and how the infrastructure operates like clockwork, or you ride the shinkansen (bullet train), you think, if this country and the people can build all this, then software should be easy. But again, Japanese banks tend to want to know everything up front. They want predictability.

Therefore, perhaps it is in the interest of Japanese customers, if they want to get the most out of their SaaS deployments, to augment their structured way of doing things with a more iterative, agile approach. Transformation, DX, and customer success can be even better with a shift in mindset towards agility and co-creation.

How are you getting your customers to implement customer success practices?

We need to practice what we preach. We need to drink our own champagne and build our own customer success culture.

Partnership and customer success need to become the foundation for everything we do, and we need to engage our customers in this way of thinking and working. Again, we need to augment their adherence to rules with a willingness to be more iterative.

We need to develop a growth mindset, where we’re willing to explore, make mistakes and leverage the knowledge and experience we gain to innovate further and offer better solutions. We need to be giving each other feedback constantly so we can improve ourselves and the work we do with customers. Training and coaching are also key, areas where Japan Cloud has been very helpful.

I should add that I don’t think Japanese customers are more difficult or risk averse than customers in other regions. Customers everywhere can be equally demanding and careful. Often it’s the individual, not the company or region, that makes an engagement challenging.

Also, Japanese customers may be slower to change, but once they adopt, they move very efficiently and are very loyal. I’m confident they’re beginning to see the benefits of our customer success approach and will adhere to them. As mentioned, key customers are beginning to tell stories about how nCino is good for their customers. This is where we want to be with all our customers.

What advice would you give global SaaS companies looking to do business in Japan?

I would tell them to come with huge aspirations because the market is certainly big enough to support them. There are more companies in Japan with revenues of USD 100 million than any other market in the world after the U.S.

To succeed, however, they need to practice locally what they preach globally. nCino’s building a customer success culture in Japan is just one example of how a company’s value proposition needs to be consistent globally.

But again, listening is essential. Imposing the global way without listening and trying to understand local behaviors is a nonstarter. It’s damaging to morale and detrimental to the business. This is true in any region. It’s also key to foster two-way engagement and involvement between teams globally and those in Japan to encourage inclusion and balance local vs global viewpoints. Field operations anywhere have a tendency to develop an “us” vs “them,” the “them” meaning corporate, mentality. Making sure this doesn’t happen is essential.

Another benefit of doing business in Japan that’s often overlooked is that Japan has so much to offer the global business. And I don’t mean just in terms of revenue contribution, but rather in terms of the discipline with which Japanese teams conduct their business. Japanese employees’ attention to detail and deadlines is invaluable, especially as a business grows bigger and more complex. This is essential to entrepreneurial companies that are scaling and need to mature.

One thing global companies need to be aware of is that success in Japan takes longer than in other markets. The myriad of processes and protocols within Japanese companies are one reason, although large companies in other regions can be just as bureaucratic.

Another reason is that customer validation is essential. My experience has been that, compared to other regions, Japanese customers need to see even more evidence that your product works and delivers agreed upon benefits. It takes time to get those early wins and success stories that build credibility and trust.

Would you recommend coming to Japan as an expat?

Definitely. My assignment here has been the biggest growth phase of my life, both professionally and personally. While the job of building trust and a local culture is never-ending, being able to promote and grow the team has made all the challenges worthwhile. We’ve grown so much together. I feel we have so much to offer our customers now and into the future. We have so much to offer Japan.

One thing expats need to do while they’re here is invest in themselves. I didn’t come here with a family, so I tended to immerse myself in work without appreciating all that Japan has to offer.

The food is extraordinary. Japan is so safe and civilized. The streets are spotless. Traveling within Japan and Asia is so easy. I’ve also joined a gym recently and have begun socializing with Japanese as well as fellow expats.

I can’t imagine being anywhere else at this moment in my life.