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IBM to Build Next-Generation Mission-Critical Systems for Suruga Bank

IBM announced today that Suruga Bank Ltd has adopted its Next Evolution in Financial Services Systems (NEFSS) for the bank's new management systems. This is the first NEFSS adoption in Japan; development of the new system will begin this year with full-scale operations scheduled for the second half of 2007.

With its focus on customer relationship management (CRM), the bank's new management systems cover a wide range of areas, including standardized or general-purpose products and services. The benefit of adopting NEFSS and other advanced system packages is to provide products and services several times faster than before, thereby increasing revenue opportunities.

The new systems will, for example, enable instantaneous and easy setting of housing loans and other types of financing -- personalized according to user attributes such as age, workplace, and family composition -- by combining interest rates, loan periods and other component functions in a variety of ways. In addition to improved CRM, Suruga Bank will benefit through improved business processes such as flexible data warehouses, new hub systems and new Internet banking systems integrating its existing accounting and information systems.

"By adopting NEFSS, Suruga Bank will be able to develop diverse financial products extremely efficiently, and have total management of customer information, thus enabling us to offer customized products and services that will meet the needs of our individual customers," said Takahiro Aoki, Officer, Quality Management Division, Suruga Bank.

"Suruga Bank has taken a big step forward with the implementation of NEFSS, which not only shows the bank's commitment towards its customers but also establishes its competitive edge," said David Burns, Asia Pacific General Manager for Financial Services, IBM Global Services.

Suruga Bank aims to fulfill its mission of anticipating customer and market needs and making the best use of its own and its business partners' offerings to effectively and flexibly provide products and services that will satisfy customers.

With banks constantly facing cost pressures, shortages of skills for older technologies, and having to constantly stay abreast of customers' needs, one of the key benefits of NEFSS is its open platform, which uses the industry standard J2EE (Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition). NEFSS offers a compliant set of offerings for banking core systems which can be used by both Japanese and other banks around the world.

Furthermore, NEFSS has a level of flexibility and scalability that does not depend on the size of a financial institution. The system enables not only the total remodeling of mission-critical systems, but also its application to particular products and services. This makes it possible to provide various forms of NEFSS to a wide range of financial institutions.

Financial product applications offered as components are developed by adding requirements for mission-critical operations at Japanese banks to the Corebank application package from Fidelity Information Services, a division of Fidelity National Financial, Inc. NEFSS uses IBM WebSphere Internet infrastructure software, and IBM DB2 Universal Database information management software. In terms of hardware, it can also run on the open mainframe IBM eServer zSeries, pSeries and xSeries servers.

About Suruga Bank

Suruga Bank is a regional bank, with eastern Shizuoka Prefecture and central/western Kanagawa Prefecture as its main base of operations. The Bank was founded in 1895. Since then, Suruga Bank has maintained sound management in accordance with its basic principles of independence and contributing to the communities it serves. In recent years, the bank has aggressively extended its operations nationwide by exploiting direct banking methods and unique & value added product offerings. Suruga Bank has therefore successfully acquired a strong customer base especially in the Tokyo metropolitan area. At the present time, Suruga Bank became well known for the being the first bank in Japan to introduce automated screening system in 1996, Net Banking Branch named "Dream Direct Branch" in 1998, CRM system in 1999 and Palm vein recognition system for making deposits in 2004. Additional information can be found at www.surugabank.co.jp.

About IBM Global Services

IBM Global Services is the world's largest information technology services and consulting provider, generating record revenue and signings in 2003 of $42.6 billion and $55.5 billion, respectively. Some 180,000 professionals in more than 160 countries help clients integrate information technology with business value -- from the business transformation and industry expertise of IBM Business Consulting Services to hosting, infrastructure, technology design and training services. Leveraging IBM's unequalled scope and scale, IBM Global Services delivers integrated, flexible and resilient processes -- across companies and through business partners -- that enable clients to benefit from the on demand business model by saving money and transforming their businesses to be more competitive. For more information, visit www.ibm.com/services.