Mizuho Financial Group Inc’s online stock platform crashed yesterday, making it harder for individual investors to trade on a day when a company whose initial public offering (IPO) it underwrote listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The fault was due to a network failure and the bank is to report more details when available, Mizuho said in a statement, without specifying when the system would recover.
Mizuho reported the issue to the Japanese Financial Services Agency, Securities Business Division spokesman Atsushi Maruyama said by telephone.
The outage was unrelated to a major systems upgrade that the financial group is implementing, Mizuho said.
Japan’s third-biggest bank by market value has suffered a series of information technology mishaps that have drawn regulatory scrutiny in the past, including a costly “fat-finger” trading mistake at its securities arm in 2005.
The glitch made it difficult for shareholders of Kokusai Pulp & Paper Co to trade the stock on its debut, Maruyama said.
Shares of the Tokyo-based paper wholesaler jumped as much as 37 percent before closing up 7.6 percent. Mizuho was the lead manager of the offering.
Mizuho’s clients “might have missed an opportunity to sell the shares at a high price,” DZH Financial Research Inc IPO analyst Kazumi Tanaka said in Tokyo.
“We were surprised to see this happen on our first day of trading,” said Haruyoshi Asada, a Kokusai Pulp executive who oversaw the listing.
It was too early to determine any effects on trading of the stock, he said.
Mizuho’s Net Club Web site for Internet trading serves 1.2 million account holders and has 130,000 users per month.
While it is offline, individual investors can still trade by telephone and at branches, Maruyama said.
An agency official confirmed that Mizuho contacted the regulator, while declining to comment further.
In December 2005, a typing error caused Mizuho Securities Co Ltd to mistakenly offer to sell 610,000 shares of J-Com Co for ￥1 each, instead of one share for ￥610,000.
The mistake cost the bank billions of yen and prompted the agency to order it to improve its operations.
Mizuho implemented the first phase of its information technology upgrade earlier this month, saying that it progressed as planned.
The project, which has incurred years of delays and cost overruns, is intended to unify the core systems of the corporate, retail and trust banking arms.
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