Page 1 - Eurogiro News May2011_web version

Eurogiro News

The Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011, followed by a tsunami, resulted in more than 14,000 people losing their lives and, even now, over 11,000 people remain unaccounted for. Approximately 130,000 are homeless or have had to be evacuated. In addition to the earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear power-plant radiation leak-age is casting a gloomy shadow on hopes of putting people’s lives back together again.

This disaster also inflicted enormous damage on the Japan Post Group in its key fields of mail, banking and insurance and on the post office network as a whole. Over 100 post of-fices/branches in the disaster area were either completely or partially destroyed.

JPB Eurogiro Payment Outflow

There are 233 Japan Post Bank Branches and over 7,000 post offices which are autho-rised to accept applications from customers for oversea remittance. These applications are sent to the Tokyo Operations Centre (TOC), which is the sole exchange office for overseas and is the ELS Production site. At TOC, the payment data is input and trans-mitted as Eurogiro envelopes to Eurogiro partners once a day. Regarding the incoming service at TOC, payment data is received from Eurogiro partners once a day. Payments are then deposited to the payees’ accounts, or money orders are printed and mailed to payees. At branches and post offices money orders can be cashed by the payee.

Difficult situation, however to main-tain normal business

After 11th March and during April, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was un-able to provide full electric coverage to the Kanto region as a result of the Fukushima nuclear reactor shut down; this included the TOC. TEPCO took the step of imposing partial blackouts to selected areas at set times with serious impact on public transportation. We were required to implement emergency measures in the event of possible blackouts, such as shutting down the Eurogiro system (ELS), to avoid malfunctions of the system. We planned precisely for optimal use of ELS, manpower and limited electricity, in accor-dance with the planned blackout time

The Great East Japan Earthquake and its

effects on Japan Post Bank’s Eurogiro business

Unprecedented Disaster

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your global payments community May 2011 - Issue 02

The PSD opens up to new business in Hellenic Post

Eurogiro Community Meeting in Warsaw

Albanian public gets free internet access in post offces

Bulgarian Posts PLC make sig- nifcant investment in an infor-mation platform for domestic and international money transfers

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