GMO Payment Gateway - Company History

The company was founded in March 1995 in Shibuya, Tokyo, with capital of $637,959 (¥60m), under the name Card Call Service. Its business was payment agency work: standing between a merchant and the card issuer to run authorization, aggregate settlements and transmit transaction data. In Japan at the time this was an odd place to stand. Card payment meant physical stores, a dedicated terminal installed at each merchant and a direct line into CAFIS, the card-processing network run by NTT Data. Online retail was worth roughly ¥20 billion a year in 1996, and almost nobody made a living processing payments over the web.

That was precisely the reasoning. In face-to-face payment, where every merchant needed its own terminal, a latecomer had no room; on the web, the firm that accumulated connections earliest would be the one merchants connected to. The first five years were spent waiting for the market to arrive — Rakuten turned profitable in 1999, Amazon Japan opened in 2000 — and building, unglamorously, the integrations that later became the company’s main segment.

Then the ownership began to move. Integran bought the company in March 2000; MTI took it from Integran that September; the name changed to Card Commerce Service in November. In July 2004 MTI parked the shares in a holding company, CCS Holding, to tidy the capital structure ahead of a listing — and in September 2004 Global Media Online (today GMO Internet Group) acquired CCS Holding in a share exchange. Four parents in four years. Under GMO the company stopped being an asset that was passed around and became the vehicle doing the buying: it took over the card-payment businesses of Asunaru in September 2004 and Payment One that November, and in February 2005 it was renamed GMO Payment Gateway.

The company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market in April 2005, two months after taking the GMO name, and moved to the First Section in September 2008. In May 2005 it bought Epsilon (today GMO Epsilon), giving it two brands running in parallel: GMO Payment Gateway for large and mid-sized merchants, Epsilon for small ones, with rates and integration specifications tuned to merchant size. For a payment processor the years after listing were a straight tailwind — as Rakuten, Amazon and Yahoo! Shopping grew, every net addition to the merchant base fed directly into transaction value and transaction count.

From 2010 the company began pushing outward from domestic e-commerce. It took an equity stake in C.O.C. (today GMO Financial Gate, its face-to-face payment arm), set up a social-app payment venture to serve the social-gaming boom — and sold it again in 2014 when that market’s economics failed to hold. In 2013 it founded GMO Payment Service, the foothold in deferred payment, the business that would later become its financial-services segment.

Asia followed in quick succession: Singapore in October 2012, chosen as the regional hub for its regulator access and concentration of multinational headquarters; Hong Kong and Malaysia in 2013; Taiwan and Thailand in 2014. Alongside them, in October 2013, the company and GMO VenturePartners set up the GMO Global Payment Fund — the instrument that made minority investment in payment start-ups a repeatable process rather than a series of one-offs. The pattern that formed here — a strategic minority stake first, a commercial partnership next, consolidation only if warranted — became the company’s standing template for deals. Revenue in FY2014, the first year under IFRS, was ¥7.2 billion.

In June 2015 the company signed a capital and business alliance with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, SMBC and its own parent GMO Internet, raising roughly ¥8 billion in a third-party allotment to SMBC and GMO. In November it set up SMBC GMO PAYMENT as a joint venture to process payments for SMBC’s merchants. In September 2016 it consolidated GMO Financial Gate, adding face-to-face processing to a business that until then had been almost purely online. The effect showed up fast: FY2016 revenue of ¥12.1 billion and operating profit of ¥3.8 billion.

The same years saw the outward push turn aggressive. In August 2016 the company took 70% of MACROKIOSK, a Malaysian mobile-payment provider, for about $10.3M (¥1bn). In June 2018 it issued ¥17 billion of euro-yen convertible bonds to fund further deals, moved into medical booking and payment through GMO Epsilon, and opened subsidiaries in the United States (2018) and India (2019).

MACROKIOSK did not work. Its business plan fell short, the company wrote down about ¥0.9 billion of goodwill in FY2019, and in May 2020 it sold the entire stake — four years from entry to exit. What the case exposed was structural: messaging-based carrier billing in Malaysia was a different business, technically and by regulation, from card processing in Japan, and 70% ownership with dispatched directors was not enough to run it. The overseas policy was rewritten around what the company was actually good at — minority stakes through the Global Payment Fund, partnership before consolidation, and an exit by selling the stake rather than restructuring an operation. Meanwhile GMO Financial Gate was listed separately on Mothers in July 2020, putting the face-to-face segment on its own market.

The company issued ¥20 billion of convertible bonds in 2021 and moved to the TSE Prime market in April 2022. Its president Ainoura Issei, chief executive since April 2000, had already been an executive vice president of GMO Internet since March 2016, and in March 2022 became group executive vice president, putting the payment subsidiary’s chief inside the parent’s decision-making. FY2022 revenue was ¥50.3 billion at a 32.3% operating margin, some 5.6 times the level of the year the SMFG alliance was signed.

By FY2025 revenue reached ¥82.49 billion with a 38.0% operating margin — roughly eleven times the ¥7.2 billion of FY2014. The shape of the business is lopsided by design: payment processing accounts for ¥61.55 billion of revenue, three quarters of the total and over 80% of segment profit, having grown about eightfold in ten years as merchant count, transaction value and transaction count moved together. Financial services — deferred and installment payment through GMO Payment Service — grew more than twenty-two-fold over the same decade, from ¥0.85 billion to ¥19.19 billion, by selling credit products into a merchant base the payment business had already assembled.

That second number is the strategy stated plainly. In a November 2024 interview Ainoura said that e-commerce payment alone could not sustain the 25% annual growth the company targets, and put non-e-commerce, everyday-life services at the centre of the plan. In January 2025 it acquired Enpay (now GMO Enpay), which collects fees for schools and nursery facilities; in June GMO Financial Gate moved up to TSE Prime; in July the company issued its first unsecured straight bond, ¥20 billion, diversifying away from convertibles. Thirty years after starting as a small Shibuya venture, it stands on three foundations it did not build alone — a megabank alliance, a separately listed face-to-face payment subsidiary, and a network of overseas minority stakes.