Shinsei Bank, one of the largest banks in Japan, is the first major bank in the world to place all of its core system on a Windows platform.

In a new report, entitled Case Study: Shinsei Bank—Windows EverywhereCelent examines an extraordinary migration of systems from a mainframe-based architecture to Windows 2000. No other bank amongst the top 100 in the world has moved its mission critical systems onto Windows 2000. Indeed, many banks have assumed that Windows was simply not up to the demands presented by the core processing systems of a large bank.

This case study examines Shinsei’s business and technology strategy, and shows how Shinsei migrated its core processing systems on to a set of applications provided by an Indian software company, i-flex solutions. In addition to being a remarkably fast migration, Shinsei was able to keep its expenses in extremely tight bounds, spending one tenth of what comparably sized banks have spent creating their own core systems.