Mizuho Bank halts leadership change following system glitches

The bank suffered four glitches in a span of two weeks.

Mizuho Bank has retracted plans to change its president and CEO following a series of system failures.

Koji Fujiwara remains as president and CEO of the bank to “respond to system incident management,” the bank said in a press release.

Masahiko Kato, who was slated to replace Fujiwara, will instead take the role of deputy president and executive officer beginning April. He is currently the managing executive officer.

The bank suffered four glitches in two weeks. The latest glitch on 13 March affected the foreign currency-denominated remittances of Mizuho’s corporate and led to the delay of around 300 transactions, Mizuho officials said.

Troubles began on 28 February when 4,300 of the bank’s ATMs in Japan stopped working, resulting in 5,244 bank cards and books stuck inside the devices and unreturned to their owners, according to a report by The Japan Times.

The glitch was a result of a system outage caused by a partial system overload that occurred after an error whilst the bank’s systems were transferring 450,000 time deposit accounts data whilst 250,000 other transactions were taking place, according to Mizuho.

This is not the first time that Mizuho faced wide-scale technical difficulties in the past two decades. In April 2002, Mizuho experienced system trouble that led to delays in processing 2.5 million automatic debit transactions when three former banks—The Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank, The Fuji Bank and The Industrial Bank of Japan—were consolidated.

Its next system trouble in March 2011 was due to the huge volume of money transfers of donations for Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami relief.