Tokyo exchange hires CIO, boosts IT capacity

TOKYO -- Tokyo Stock Exchange Inc. last week named a new CIO in the aftermath of an early shutdown of trading that prompted the exchange to shorten its trading hours indefinitely and led to widespread criticism of its IT management.

The operator of the world's second-largest stock market tapped Yoshinori Suzuki, formerly an executive at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., to oversee its IT strategy. Suzuki, 57, will assume the CIO post on Feb. 1.

The move came just a week after the exchange was forced to halt trading 20 minutes early on Jan. 18, when its computer systems nearly reached their daily limit of processing 4.5 million trades. Officials then decided to shorten the trading day by 30 minutes for what they described as "the foreseeable future."

Since then, the exchange has boosted the processing capacity to 5 million trades per day, and it plans to begin using a new trade-clearing system today. However, that won't provide any further capacity boosts.