Zenkoku Hosho was incorporated in February 1981 in Otemachi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, with capital of $226,706 (¥50m) and a single stated purpose: credit guarantee. In the Japan of that moment, housing finance ran through the state. The 住宅金融公庫 (Government Housing Loan Corporation) and the regional housing supply corporations provided the core of what households borrowed to buy a home, and private mortgage lending was still a supplementary business. In April 1981 the new company began guaranteeing loans made under the employees’ pension housing scheme — work on the outer rim of the public credit system.
The founding constraint was also the founding idea. A guarantor that sits inside one bank’s group is, to every rival bank, a competitor; a guarantor that sits inside no group can be a counterparty to all of them. For its first fifteen years the company lived off public-scheme guarantees while quietly building the thing that would later matter — a national footprint. Osaka came in 1986, Yokohama in 1987, Sapporo in 1995, and in December 1994 it added guarantees for the housing supply corporations. There were no consolidated results to publish and no shareholders to answer to; it was a small, unlisted, deliberately unaffiliated firm waiting for the market to move.
1997Starts private mortgage guarantees — the turning point
1998Guaranteed obligations reach ¥1 trillion
2002Launches the flagship 住まいる いちばん guarantee product
2007Guaranteed obligations reach ¥5 trillion
2010Zenkoku Business Partner set up for lender back-office work
In July 1997 the company began guaranteeing mortgages for private financial institutions, and everything that Zenkoku Hosho is today follows from that date. The public lender was retreating, banks were beginning to push mortgage underwriting outside their own walls, and the institutions with the least ability to build a captive guarantor — shinkin banks, credit unions, agricultural co-operatives, second-tier regional banks — needed someone to stand as the joint guarantor a 25- or 30-year loan requires. Being affiliated with nobody converted directly into a sales method: sign the same contract with every type of lender, in parallel, and let no single bank or single regional economy concentrate the risk.
The economics compounded fast. Guarantee fees are collected up front and the only real variable cost is subrogation — paying the lender when a borrower defaults — so every new contract stacked balance on top of a largely fixed cost base. Guaranteed obligations passed ¥1 trillion in May 1998 and ¥5 trillion in March 2007, twenty-six years after founding. The product line thickened around the core: education-loan guarantees in 2001, the flagship 住まいる いちばん mortgage-guarantee product in 2002 and its Plus version in 2005.
The branch map filled in behind it — Nagoya and Sendai in 2002, Hiroshima in 2003, Kanazawa, Niigata, Miyazaki — while the megabank- and regional-bank-owned guarantors defended their own group business. In 2010 the company set up Zenkoku Business Partner to take on back-office processing for partner lenders, standardising the paperwork that made a one-to-many alliance model workable in the first place.
In December 2012 Zenkoku Hosho listed directly on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange — an unusual route for a first-time issuer, and one the profitability of the guarantee book made possible. The money raised was modest. What the listing actually bought was standing: a listed, steadily dividend-paying guarantor could have its guarantees classified as high-quality by partner lenders, which lightened their provisioning — an argument the company could not make while it was private, even with ¥7 trillion of obligations on its books.
The decade that followed was the pure expression of the model. Consolidated operating revenue rose from ¥21.1bn in FY2011 to ¥35.9bn in FY2016 and ¥48.8bn in FY2021, while ordinary profit went from ¥5.0bn to ¥29.0bn and then ¥40.6bn — an operating structure in which incremental balance falls almost straight through to profit. Card-loan guarantees were added in 2014; guaranteed obligations hit ¥10 trillion in March 2016 and ¥15 trillion in September 2021.
Then the shape of growth changed. In December 2018 the company bought a debt-collection firm (now Akebono Servicer), separating recovery on subrogated claims from the guarantee business itself. In February 2020 it acquired Towa Credit Guarantee (now Minori Credit Guarantee) from a Gunma lender, and in March 2021 Tsukuba Credit Guarantee from Tsukuba Bank. Buying a regional guarantor meant buying its exclusive or preferential pipe into a local bank — growth by acquiring contracts rather than by opening another sales office.
2025Mie Sogo Credit and Tohoku Hosho Service acquired
April 2022 moved the shares to the TSE Prime Market; June 2022 moved the company. Ishikawa Eiji stepped up to chairman and Aoki Yuichi, an insider promoted from the corporate-planning side, became president — the first real handover of executive control since the founding. Under him the acquisition programme stopped being opportunistic and became the annual plan: a capital and business alliance with Shikoku Sogo Credit in 2022, Higashi-Nihon Hosho Service in 2023 (merged into Tsukuba Credit Guarantee in 2024), Chiba Kogin Card Service in 2024, and Mie Sogo Credit and Tohoku Hosho Service together in February 2025.
The financial machine kept running: operating revenue of ¥56.9bn in FY2024 against ¥48.8bn three years earlier, net profit of ¥32.1bn, and an ordinary margin still near 78% — a level sustained since the listing. But the market underneath is contracting from three directions at once. The population is shrinking and younger households are less inclined to buy; the state-backed フラット35 holds an advantage in fixed-rate lending; and online banks compete on price. Adding balance organically is simply harder than it was.
Hence the strategy of the mid-term plan, Next Phase: expand the regional group, widen the product range into card loans, education loans and card-related services, and accept that some of what is for sale is for sale because its seller sees no growth in it. Against roughly ¥16 trillion of guaranteed obligations, the company’s results remain a function of credit risk through a housing cycle — and of whether contracts bought from others keep performing after they change hands.
When it moved into the private market in July 1997, this company had little to sell. Sixteen years of trading amounted to guarantees attached to public lending schemes; capital still stood at ¥50 million; the branch list ran to Osaka, Yokohama and Sapporo. What it had was one fact: it belonged to no financial group. To a bank with its own captive guarantor that made it a competitor — but to a shinkin bank, a credit union or an agricultural co-operative with no such vehicle, it was a counterparty that could be dealt with on identical terms across the whole spectrum of institutions. That guaranteed obligations to shinkin banks stood at ¥4,614.6bn at the end of March 2012, against ¥1,703.0bn for banks, shows where it reached first.
It is harder to argue that the entry was made having read the public lender’s retreat in advance. In fiscal 1997 the Government Housing Loan Corporation still accounted for 33.5% of new housing loans; the fall to 2.2% came eight years later, in fiscal 2005. What was visible at the moment of entry looks to have gone no further than the fact that the private share was rising. And the balance that accumulated was also an accumulation of future subrogation payments: in the year to March 2012 the company paid out ¥18.8bn and recovered only ¥10.9bn. In a business where fees are received first and drawn down afterwards, success or failure was settled not by the decision to enter but by fifteen subsequent years of underwriting and claims management.
The first benefit the company itself cited for listing was neither the proceeds nor the publicity, but how lenders would assess their assets. Once listed and paying a stable dividend, deals carrying its guarantee could be classified as high-quality guarantees, and partner institutions could carry lighter provisions. It was guaranteeing ¥7 trillion and, while private, had few means of demonstrating to a counterparty how sound that guarantee was. The $101.3M (¥8bn) raised is small as consideration for issuing 7.35 million new shares. What this listing bought looks less like capital than like a rank it could quote when selling a guarantee.
That rank was not free. If the condition for being treated as a high-quality guarantee is “listed and paying a stable dividend,” then squeezing the dividend damages the commercial terms themselves. The prospect of a shrinking housing market was acknowledged in the listing application documents; within that, the company chose for itself the position of having to keep growing balance and profit. The investment partnership and life insurer that took shares at ¥53,000 each in 2009 reduced their holdings after the listing, and by the end of March 2014 foreign corporations held 25.77%. It was the price of turning a quiet private company into one asked for its numbers every quarter.
Mie Sogo Credit had stopped accepting new guarantees in May 2021, three and a half years before it was bought. A deal paying $12.5M (¥2bn) for a company that had ceased selling makes sense only because what was being bought was not future sales capability. What Zenkoku Hosho took over was the bundle of guarantee contracts already signed, and the balance they generate. Prospecting for partner lenders one by one and raising utilisation rates has the same objective as this transaction; only the use of time differs. In a business certain to contract, the judgement appears to have been that taking over balance someone else has built is the faster route.
Speed has its price, though. The companies a seller lets go are also the companies in which the seller sees little upside, and they include books like Mie Sogo Credit’s that are running down. Operating profit for the year to March 2024 fell below the prior year, in the same period as the acquisitions were stacking up. With Shikoku Sogo Credit, the 2022 capital and business alliance has not progressed to a full acquisition, and Nakanihon Sogo Credit remains at 23.0%. The regional guarantee network is not a thing that can simply be bought outright by putting up money; it is an area where the structure of each deal has to bend to the counterparty’s shareholder register and local circumstances.
Each heading links to the full Japanese analysis — background, decision and outcome, with sources.
This is a condensed English edition. The full, source-by-source history — with the detailed narrative, financial tables, shareholders and executives — is maintained in Japanese: 日本語版（詳細）— Zenkoku Hosho full history in Japanese →
Zenkoku Hosho Co., Ltd. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports), years ended March 2013, 2014, 2020 and 2026.
Zenkoku Hosho Co., Ltd. — securities report for the new listing application, Part I (新規上場申請のための有価証券報告書（Ⅰの部）), 2012. JPX.
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