2022–present
Sustained the company's revenue-generating sales channel with a small team, and expanded the business with features such as a site for distribution partners
Background
In a business that sells unlisted-equity funds online, the system is not a cost center — it is the sales channel itself. Outages translate directly into lost sales, and under Japan's Type II Financial Instruments Business regulation, reliability and business speed both had to be delivered.
Constraints
- Mandatory compliance with financial regulation (Type II Financial Instruments Business)
- Outage = lost sales: high-availability requirements tied directly to business continuity
- Development and operations with a small team (doubling as corporate IT)
- Platform modernization without stopping the service (Ruby 2.7→3.3, Rails 5.2→7.1)
Approach
'Defend, then attack.' With stable operations and compliance as the foundation, prioritized features that expand sales opportunities. Platform modernization was staged so sales never stopped.
Implementation
Channel expansion: built a partner site for distribution partners, opening sales routes beyond the company's own site. Product strength: developed fund-transfer and amount/time-priority features. Back office: built accounting export tooling. Platform: robust AWS infrastructure (EC2, RDS, CloudFront, WAF) and multiple major Ruby/Rails version upgrades completed.
Results
- Opened a sales channel beyond the company's own site with a partner site for distributors
- Strengthened the product with fund-transfer and amount/time-priority features
- Maintained stable operations with a small team, protecting sales opportunities
- Completed Ruby 2.7→3.3 / Rails 5.2→7.1 upgrades with zero downtime
Learnings
Financial systems get attention for their 'defense', but this system is, at heart, a revenue-generating sales channel. Engineering value lies in how quickly and safely you can ship business-expanding features on a foundation of stability and control.