Mizuho Financial Group Uses Netskope to Scale AI Agent Development Securely

The Digital Strategy Department plays a central role in driving AI Transformation across Mizuho Financial Group. Tatsuto Fujii, General Manager of the Digital Strategy Department and Chief AI Officer, explains how the organization has evolved. “The Digital Strategy Department was established in April 2025 through the reorganization of the former Digital Planning Department,” Fujii says. “We started with around 20 employees and have since grown to an organization of approximately 400 people, including partner companies. With AI at the center of our strategy, we are responsible for planning and managing DX initiatives across Mizuho. We work across organizational boundaries in collaboration with business divisions to advance AI Transformation, while demonstrating the benefits and costs of AI to senior management and building consensus around our initiatives.”

Fujii believes the AI agent era requires a new approach to security. “Because AI agents make decisions and take actions autonomously, guardrails are essential to control their behavior,” he explains. “We also need to be able to trace what data an agent used and how it reached a particular decision, as well as manage multi-agent environments. As AI agents increasingly connect with both internal and external systems, Mizuho Financial Group has defined its own design principles for AI agent development through AIOA, or AI Oriented Architecture. We will continue to evolve AIOA as AI technology advances.”

In accordance with Mizuho’s security standards and AIOA, the group has established three closely integrated components to drive AI Transformation: Mizuho Wiz Base, an AWS-based AI agent development platform; Agent Factory, a framework of shared capabilities for efficiently developing, evaluating, and improving AI agents; and the in-house development lab within the Digital Strategy Department. As AI agent development accelerated, however, the team encountered a key challenge: how to maintain strong security without compromising developer productivity.

When evaluating SASE solutions to strengthen security, Mizuho Financial Group selected Netskope. Akitoshi Murase, Deputy General Manager, Technology Team 2, Digital Strategy Department, explains why. “Netskope had already been deployed at the former Mizuho Research & Technologies, now part of Mizuho Bank, so we had accumulated internal knowledge and experience with the platform, including its strengths at the application layer and ease of integration with identity providers,” Murase says. “Because we already had that knowledge and experience within the organization, we were able to deploy Netskope quickly without incurring the cost and time of conducting extensive new evaluations.”

Netskope’s track record in in-house development environments at other financial institutions was another important factor. “When security controls are introduced into a development environment, applying uniform restrictions to network traffic can affect developer productivity,” Murase explains. “With Netskope, we believed we could analyze traffic in detail and apply granular policies, allowing us to protect sensitive data while accommodating developer requirements. CASB gives us visibility into shadow IT and shadow AI and provides the foundation for controlling or blocking traffic when necessary. And as more development projects involve sensitive data, DLP can help reduce the risk of data exfiltration without compromising the developer experience.”

Koike also saw significant value in the integrated AI security capabilities available through Netskope One AI Security. “By combining existing SASE capabilities with AI security technologies such as Agentic Broker, which provides visibility and control over communications between AI agents and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, and AI Guardrails, which inspects and controls user and AI agent prompts and AI-generated responses in real time, we felt we could build a security environment designed for the AI era,” he says.

“Unlike a conventional support desk that customers contact only when a problem occurs, the TAM provides dedicated, hands-on assistance from a Japan-based Netskope engineer. Our TAM works alongside us, providing technical advice, health checks, escalation management when issues arise, and other ongoing support,” Tanaka explains. “As we work together to address the challenges that come with expanding functionality and improving operations, our own team is also building its operational skills and expertise.”

Koike adds, “It is not only the TAM. We feel that Netskope supports us as one team, including the sales team.”