By listing on the New York Stock Exchange, several Japanese companies have increased their global profiles, diversified their shareholder bases and expanded their strategic options.
Japanese financial services companies, in particular, also stand to benefit from the increased capital flows that can result from adoption of shareholder-driven corporate governance practices and the greater levels of transparency and disclosure required for an NYSE listing.
Since issuing American Depositary Receipts on the NYSE in April of last year, Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group has filed its annual reports under US generally accepted accounting principles. Preparing to do so was no small task for one of the largest bank holding companies in the world. Mitsubishi Tokyo has over $810 billion in assets between its two subsidiaries, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (Y89.8 trillion) and Mitsubishi Trust and Banking (Y18.7 trillion).
Fortunately, the New York branch of Mitsubishi Trust and Banking (MT&B) had the start of a solution, via the software it used for data extraction, transformation and presentation from Sagent Technology. Sagent SA, the exclusive distributor of the Sagent Solution in Southern Africa, represents Sagent Technology in SA. In addition to Sagent Solution training and services, Sagent SA conducts software independent education and consulting services.
Sagent partnered with Information Services International-Dentsu in Japan to implement its technology in Mitsubishi Trust and Banking's Tokyo headquarters. The result was striking: the time to assemble annual reports for the SEC fell from approximately seven months worth of man hours to less than five working days.
Compiling the books for Mitsubishi Trust and Banking posed a difficult challenge. As a result of the formation of Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group two years ago, MT&B had acquired two trust banks that had been held by Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. Therefore, Mitsubishi Trust and Banking had to draw information from the systems of what had been three separate organisations in order to report its results to the parent company for further consolidation.
Sagent's Data Flow Server provided the hub for retrieval and processing of these three companies' disparate collections of data.
But it wasn't just the hub that made rapid deployment possible. The company also supplied the bank with visual design tools that helped the implementation team to quickly build interfaces between systems, along with an extensive, reusable library of algorithms and display templates.
"The solution is easy to implement and use, thus reducing development costs," said Takashi Nakashizuka, chief manager, planning and coordination, global markets business group, Mitsubishi Trust and Banking.
"There was a high degree of completeness in the product, including the system security features required in our industry," Nakashizuka added.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers provided project management and business consulting expertise for the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi implementation.
By adopting best-of-breed information technology to manage data from its various financial services businesses, Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group has begun to pursue the objectives of its medium-term business plan: to dispose of problem loans and reduce equity holdings; to reform management through cost-cutting and restructuring; to interact with clients as a unified, comprehensive financial service group; and to incorporate a shareholder value perspective into corporate management.
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