Japan’s first megabank API link, and opening accounting data to a regional bank (2016)

Getting the window opened, and what came after

The remark by Shuji Tsuemura, senior managing director of Hokkoku Bank — that he was astonished to see adoption across Hokuriku rise to about 4,000 companies — shows from which side’s need this connection began. freee wanted account statements from the banks; the regional bank wanted a way to know the bookkeeping, and the real condition, of the firms it lent to. What was new about the Mizuho link was less the technology than the fact that it ended the practice of holding customers’ IDs and passwords and made the bank open a window instead. That switch came nearly six months before the cabinet approved the amended Banking Act.

The connection did not, however, turn into numbers at once. In that same spring of 2017 Money Forward was also working with seventeen financial institutions, and had brought a funding-support product for small firms to market first. freee established Freee Finance Lab only in October 2018 and released its cash-flow navigator in June 2019, and the operating loss for the year to June 2019 still ran to $25.7M (¥3bn). Making a bank open its window took several years to reach the revenue line.