Mizuho to Start Work on Unifying Core Computer Systems

June 5, 2018

Tokyo- Japanese megabank group Mizuho Financial Group Inc., the parent of Mizuho Bank, will start work on Saturday to unify its core computer systems for banking operations.

The system integration work will finally come 16 years after former Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Fuji Bank and the Industrial Bank of Japan, which together established the Mizuho group in 2000 to integrate their operations, were fully realigned into retail service entity Mizuho Bank and wholesale service arm Mizuho Corporate Bank in April 2002. Mizuho Corporate Bank was merged into Mizuho Bank in 2013.

This time, the Mizuho group will spend about one year to complete the system integration, after it suffered massive system failures twice in the past. Huge amounts of individual and corporate customer data will be switched to a new system in nine batches.

Mizuho Bank will suspend the use of its automated teller machines a total of nine times in line with the data transfers. The first ATM service suspension will be between 10 p.m. on Saturday (1 p.m. GMT) and 8 a.m. on June 11. The final suspension is planned some time in the first half of fiscal 2019, which starts in April next year.

Mizuho Bank is calling on its customers to withdraw cash in advance if necessary as they will not be able to use their cash cards with ATMs of the bank and its partner banks during the service suspensions. The bank will also halt its online banking services during the suspensions.

At Mizuho Bank, a massive system glitch occurred on the first day of operations in April 2002 and just after the March 2011 powerful earthquake and tsunami that mainly hit the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan.

Mizuho Bank has some 24 million individual customers.

The planned system integration has been delayed from the initially envisaged late fiscal 2015, and costs to develop the new system have ballooned to about 450 billion yen from some 300 billion yen. Jiji Press