Press Conference by ASO Taro, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and Minister of State for Financial Services

(Excerpt)

(Tuesday, December １, 2020, ９:40 am to ９:45 am)

[Questions and answers:]

Q.

The Financial Services Agency issued a business improvement order to JPX and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) yesterday, and the focus now will likely be on whether the TSE can thoroughly implement measures to prevent recurrences. Could you please let us hear your thoughts on whether the TSE will be able to do so and whether these measures will prove to be effective?

A.

In response to the October 1 system breakdown at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Financial Services Agency issued a business improvement order to the TSE and JPX -- the Japan Exchange Group – in accordance with the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, requesting that they implement measures to prevent recurrences and clarify where responsibility for the breakdown lay. The TSE and the Japan Exchange Group, with this business improvement order in mind, need to ensure that adequate measures are promptly and reliably implemented to prevent system breakdowns and to quickly restore systems if they nevertheless suffer a breakdown. Since we are talking about hardware, it is not particularly surprising that a breakdown might occur, but decisions need to be made on what to do if a system breaks down and what software is needed to deal with such breakdowns, as well as other non-hardware questions such as whether orders already placed will be cancelled or remain open. Things can get out of control if these decisions have not already been made, so this is what we have asked them to do. There are other aspects to this issue, including the company from which TSE ordered the hardware involved, and we need to have them address these aspects as well.