Tokyo Star Bank's new offerings are focused around building robust relationships with customers, while providing corporate growth and differentiating its business through process efficiencies. The bank selected webMethods Fabric for its IT infrastructure backbone in order to deliver the new customer-oriented offerings because webMethods' vision of integrating, assembling and optimizing business processes falls directly in line with the bank's executive management philosophy.

"Tokyo Star Bank is building its information systems around answering a variety of customer needs and keeping pace with rapidly changing market demands," said Mr. Yutaka Murayama, executive officer and CIO, Tokyo Star Bank. "webMethods provides Tokyo Star Bank with the agile IT system infrastructure required to maximize return on investment and cope with the constantly changing dynamics of the financial services environment."

Through the implementation of webMethods' Web services-based integration solution, Tokyo Star Bank can fully leverage current IT assets, realize flexible and low-cost operations, reduce development time and costs, and quickly adapt to changing financial market conditions and customer needs. Tokyo Star Bank expects webMethods Fabric will enable it to reduce business process and associated IT system development and maintenance costs by 60%.

Tokyo Star Bank's improved customer-oriented services are unique and not offered by traditional Japanese banks. The services include:

Financial Lounges - bank branches focusing on providing asset management advice to customers.

Star-One Mortgage - offset mortgages that allow Tokyo Star Bank to take into account a customer's savings when calculating how much they owe each month.

Foreign Currency - a placement of a sum of foreign currency funds for a fixed period at a quoted interest rate, with Tokyo Star Bank's guarantee of service.

"We are very pleased that Tokyo Star Bank, which is growing exponentially as a new type of financial institution, selected webMethods Fabric," said Akimasa Koizumi, president and CEO, webMethods K.K. "webMethods will help Tokyo Star Bank build a flexible IT system environment that will enable them to further expand and continue to provide innovative products and services. With our mature, proven financial services solution, already in place at over 75 financial services customers worldwide, webMethods will help Tokyo Star Bank build an organization that will meet customer and market demands."