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  • Mitsui, Hitachi, Five Banks to Join Bolero Project
  • June 26, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and Hitachi Ltd. will formally join the Bolero Project, an experiment slated to start in November to promote worldwide document creation and trading settlements entirely by electronic means.
    Also joining from Japan through the two companies are five city banks, an associated source said.

    The objective of Bolero is to create electronic documents related to trading, such as bills of lading, and to employ electronic data interchange (EDI) for transacting all trading settlements via banks . The experiment will start in November with a few select companies and its formal launch is in April 1999.

    Because many companies that conduct import and export businesses are expected to use it in the future, the Bolero project is attracting substantial interest.

    The Japanese city banks that will join the project are Sakura Bank Ltd., Sanwa Bank Ltd., Sumitomo Bank Ltd., Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd. and Fuji Bank Ltd. Trading companies including Sumitomo Corp. and Marubeni Corp. are scheduled to join later.

    Bills of lading are now exchanged by international mail services. In Europe, an experiment of creating electronic letters of credit began in 1994, which later took shape as the Bolero project.

    It is now managed by the company called Bolero in the United Kingdom , which was established by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) and others.

    Japanese companies plan to keep abreast of the project's developments.

    Mitsui and Hitachi cooperate with Sanwa Bank, which is becoming active in the Bolero project among the Japanese "keiretsu" groups. Nihon Unisys Ltd., which has a capital tie-up with Mitsui, also is joining the project. These four companies represent the center of collaboration among companies that are supporting the Bolero project.

    Mitsui believes that it is necessary to design a system to smoothly transact trading-related financial data among Bolero participants and their clients in order to promote EDI.

    Mitsui is actively building an EDI network with its clients. Sanwa Bank also is considering a move to tighten relations between its clients that plan to join Bolero, and Sanwa Bank will do this in part by joining Bolero.

    Another trade/finance EDI project called EDEN is promoted by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. EDEN is being developed mainly by IBM Japan Ltd. and the experiment will start this fall. It will proceed to a next-phase commercial project to start in fiscal 1999.

    It is not clear if Bolero and EDEN will be complementary or in competition. EDEN lags behind Bolero because the time for a formal launch is not yet fixed.

    (Nikkei Computer)


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    Updated: Thu Jun 25 15:36:34 1998