Japan’s Mizuho Financial Group suffers new glitch

Mizuho Financial Group’s primary banking arm experienced a system glitch that left most of its branches across the country incapacitated. The glitch made it impossible to successfully process transactions on Friday. 

The most recent glitch follows a series of other unencouraging events. This time, Mizuho’s core “Minori” banking system was affected. This forestalled many in-person transactions until about 9.50 am local time when service was restored.

Mizuho’s trust bank unit was also affected by the glitch, while automated teller machines (ATMs) and online banking services continued to run without any hitch. Yet, the effect of the glitch remains vital since the in-branch services are popular among the lender’s senior individual customers and corporate clients.

These series of outages, which first began in March, have landed a huge blow to the reputation of Japan’s third-largest lender. 

Given technical and financial upgrade commitments (running into US$3.6 billion) made in 2019, the persistence of these hitches raises a serious concern.

“We want Mizuho to restore its system and respond carefully,” Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters. “We have not received any report from Mizuho yet as to how they are dealing with it.”