Mizuho Bank generates savings with global expense management

 With 86 offices, Mizuho Bank’s Global Corporate Company delivers advanced financial services to customers worldwide. Because its operations are spread around the world, budgeting season meant long days for the Global Corporate Coordination department. Each individual office completed and submitted a spreadsheet of their expense budget, and five or six members of the Financial Control Team spent weeks, often working overtime, to compile the expense figures into a unified view.

“Not only do we have a large number of offices, but the data they provided was itemized by labor costs, property costs, investments, miscellaneous costs, and so on,” explains Mr. Shotaro Satori, Manager of the Financial Control Team. “Therefore, compiling it took extra time.” The errors inherent in manually completed spreadsheets — and the time spent identifying and correcting them — added to the challenge, and a corporate initiative for stricter management accounting increased the pressure to find a better way.
 

 Driver-based cost allocation with fine granularity

Mizuho Bank’s Global Corporate Company decided to transform its expense management system, and after evaluating three competing solutions, the team chose Anaplan and engaged Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting (Deloitte) to manage the project as an Anaplan implementation partner. “The strong long-term relationship between Mizuho Bank and Deloitte enabled us to accurately define the challenges they wanted to address,” says Ms. Shoko Kurihara of Deloitte. “This led to an Anaplan solution proposal that was ideal for their needs.”

The solution, rolled out in stages in compliance with local regulations, enables each office worldwide to enter their expenses directly in Anaplan, allocating them by categories pre-established by the Financial Control Team. The data is automatically aggregated and shared with headquarters, removing spreadsheet-related tasks and eliminating input and calculation errors.

“The traceability of data in Anaplan allows us to understand the driver-based cost allocation to a fine level of granularity at each step without having to ask the field,” explains Mr. Mayu Izumi, Vice President of Mizuho Bank’s Financial Control Team.

The solution cut the time for data aggregation by more than 50%. Two or three people (down from five or six) now complete the work in the same amount of time, with no overtime. Anaplan also enables the team to create the entire annual budget much faster. “After implementing Anaplan, the budgeting process for the next fiscal year has been reduced by about two weeks,” said Mr. Satori. “It used to take eight weeks in total.”
 

Benefits beyond the finance department

The benefits extend beyond the Financial Control Team. According to Mizuho Financial Group’s published reports, the Global Corporate Company’s expense ratio has been reduced from 72% in FY2017 to 55% in FY2020 — a reduction Mr. Satori attributes in part to Anaplan.

Having unified expense data has also helped the company identify other types of savings. For example, before Anaplan, it was difficult to see at a glance how money was spent at each location. Now, leaders can visualize the breakdown of expenses at all offices and identify cost-reduction measures; for example, some routine data-entry tasks have been shifted to different locales. “Transferring such work from a country with high labor costs to a country with low labor costs will lower the overall cost,” explains Mr. Satori. “We would like to continue our efforts to reduce costs for the entire group by encouraging offshoring of operations through repeated comparison and analysis.”

Mizuho Bank’s Global Corporate Company chose Anaplan for its rapid implementation, cost efficiency, functionality, and completeness, and the ease and flexibility of designing the precise solution they needed for expense budgeting and management. “We have achieved effective cost reduction by decreasing working hours and resources, as well as by effectively planning and implementing various cost reduction measures,” Mr. Satori concludes. “We believe that the ROI of implementing Anaplan is quite positive.”