Company: Mizuho Financial Group, Inc.
Representative: President & Group CEO Tatsufumi Sakai
Head Office: 1-5-5 Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Stock code: 8411 (First Section of Tokyo Stock Exchange)
Company: Mizuho Bank, Ltd.
Representative: President & CEO Koji Fujiwara
Head Office: 1-5-5 Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Today, Mizuho Financial Group, Inc. and Mizuho Bank, Ltd. submitted a business improvement plan to the Japanese Financial Services Agency based on the business improvement order issued on November 26, 2021.
Regarding the recent series of IT system failures that began from February 28, 2021, as a financial institution bearing responsibility for maintaining societal infrastructure, we deeply apologize for the inconvenience and concern we have caused to our customers and society by allowing these system failures to occur repeatedly in a short period of time and, as a consequence, failing to adequately fulfill our role in facilitating smooth settlements.
In the business improvement plan we submitted today, we have fully assessed and revised the measures for improving IT systems that we have formulated up until now, as well as our measures for customer relations and crisis management. In designing the plan, we gathered feedback from frontline offices and also sought out external viewpoints and expert insights in order to ensure the effectiveness, completeness, and continuity of the plan. Following this assessment and revision, we will continue to steadily implement our measures to prevent further incidents and further enhance our multilayered system failure response capabilities.
Also, to strengthen governance throughout the entire group, we have formulated measures on business strategy and corporate resource allocations based on an assessment of the on-the-ground situation, strengthen our internal management structure for IT system risk management and legal and regulatory compliance, and further enhance our supervisory functions, in line with the roles and functions of Mizuho Financial Group and Mizuho Bank.
Furthermore, we will take measures to enhance our frameworks for our people and organization and reform our corporate culture. This will serve as the foundation for enhancing the effectiveness and sustainability of our measures to prevent further incidents and our corporate management.
Both Mizuho Financial Group and Mizuho Bank are steadily implementing business improvement plans to prevent such a situation from happening again. In order to ensure that customers can use Mizuho services with peace of mind, all directors and employees will work together as an organization to establish a strong framework that prevents system failures from having a significant impact on customers and that minimizes the impact on customers even in the event of a failure. We will continue to pursue these initiatives under our current ever-changing environment.
As announced on June 15, 2021, Mizuho Financial Group and Mizuho Bank have established the System Failure Response Evaluation Committee on the supervisory side and the System Failure Improvement Promotion Committee on the business execution side, to follow up on, review, and revise the business improvement plan. We will continuously verify the progress of measures to prevent further incidents through both of these perspectives.
Please refer to the attachments for an overview of the business improvement plan.
Attachment 1： Mizuho Bank Business Improvement Plan (PDF/115KB)
Attachment 2： Clarification of Responsibility of Senior Management (PDF/53KB)