Suruga Bank in Japan has contracted with IBM for the implementation of the vendor's Next Evolution in Financial Services Systems (NEFSS).
IBM says the deal marks 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.
The J2EE-based core banking system will integrate the bank's existing accounting and information systems with the aim of improving customer relationship management, allowing for flexible data warehousing and precision targetting of bank products.
Takahiro Aoki, Officer, quality management division, Suruga Bank says the implementation will enable the bank to "develop diverse financial products extremely efficiently, and have total management of customer information".
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. The package features core banking components sourced from Fidelity Information Services.