Company history

In May 1920, in the slump that followed the First World War, the Seventy-Fourth Bank — Yokohama’s largest commercial bank, in business since 1878 as the financier of the raw-silk exporters — suspended payments in the face of a run. The Yokohama Savings Bank failed within the same year, and the port city’s credit system came apart. The rescue was not a private venture. The government and the Bank of Japan put up a special loan of ¥16 million; directors served without pay and the shares paid no dividend; and on 16 December 1920 Yokohama Kōshin Bank opened with an unusual principal business — collecting and disposing of the bad assets of the two banks that had gone down.

Most Japanese regional banks trace back to a money-changer or a national bank of the 1870s. This one was a crisis instrument, and the work it was built for made consolidation its ordinary mode of operation. It absorbed the Sōda Bank in 1927 and the Daini Bank in 1928 — the latter the successor to Yokohama’s Second National Bank, itself grown out of the Yokohama Exchange Company of 1869, so that the city’s oldest financial lineage passed to a bank founded to clear up its newest wreckage — then the Kantō Kōshin Bank in 1932.

The wartime policy of one bank per prefecture finished the job. Six more Kanagawa banks were merged in a single stroke in 1941, the Tonan Savings Bank in 1945, and — the special-purpose Yokohama Specie Bank aside — no other bank was headquartered in the prefecture. More than ten banks in twenty-five years: a workout vehicle had become the whole of Kanagawa’s banking.

In 1957 the bank dropped the word kōshin — “credit investigation,” a name that still carried the smell of receivership — and became the Bank of Yokohama. The renaming was a claim on the future rather than the past, and the ground under it was moving fast: Kanagawa sat next to Tokyo, its population grew at more than 4% a year from 1955 to 1970, and the Keihin industrial belt thickened along the same commuter lines. Deposits and lending grew with the prefecture, and in 1969 — forty-nine years after being founded to clean up someone else’s failure — the Bank of Yokohama held more deposits than any other regional bank in Japan.

Scale then invited ambition of a different kind. Backed by the largest deposit base in its league, the bank spent the 1980s trying to behave like a city bank: international business, overseas acquisitions, securities dealing — the profitable, prestigious departments that a purely regional franchise does not have. It was a stretch made possible by size, and it would be undone by the same markets that had made it look easy.

The reversal came in 1991. With markets turning and bad loans eating into earnings, the bank stopped expanding, pulled resources out of international and securities work, and turned back to retail and to Kanagawa — a market it knew to be thin, and one where the city banks were already fighting hard. Critics called it a conversion of convenience, home-town banking rediscovered only once the glamorous business stopped paying. In 1993 the bank moved its head office to the newly built Minato Mirai waterfront, tying its identity to Yokohama’s own redevelopment, and in 1996 it gave the retreat an operating shape: Kanagawa was cut into 26 areas, each to be held on its own terms, with a geographic information system putting customer data behind decisions that had run on instinct.

The bad loans of the “mini city bank” years still had to be paid for. After the failures of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank and Yamaichi Securities in 1997, the Bank of Yokohama took $1.9B (¥220bn) of public funds in subordinated loans and preferred shares across 1998–99 — the most prominent regional-bank recipient in a rescue aimed mainly at the city banks. President Hirasawa Sadaaki set up a committee to rebuild the operating structure and pushed through early retirements and transfers.

The repair worked faster than promised. Costs came down, the retail franchise recovered, and in August 2004 the bank repaid the full ¥220 billion — eighteen months ahead of a seven-year schedule agreed with the state. A bank born owing the government and the Bank of Japan ¥16 million had, eight decades on, cleared a rescue of its own ahead of time.

Defending one prefecture stopped being enough. With the population shrinking and rates pinned near zero, growth had to come from geography, and in November 2014 the Bank of Yokohama agreed terms with the Higashi-Nippon Bank — founded in Mito in 1924 as a mutual-loan company, converted to an ordinary bank in 1989, and holding some 49 branches inside Tokyo where Yokohama, with about 180 branches in Kanagawa, had only 20. The networks barely overlapped, which was the point. In April 2016 a share transfer created the holding company Concordia Financial Group — Latin for harmony, a deliberately neutral name for a merger of unequals, since Yokohama was roughly seven times the larger and effectively in charge. Combined assets of $159.9B (¥17.4tn) made it the biggest regional banking group in Japan, ahead of Fukuoka Financial Group.

The third piece came in 2023, when the group bought and then fully acquired the Kanagawa Bank, a smaller lender founded in 1953 as a credit association and strong in loans to small businesses. Three banks now divided the work across the same map — the 1996 idea of holding territory as a surface rather than as a set of branches, carried to its conclusion. President Kataoka Tatsuya stressed that the deal was done while both banks were healthy and before rates began to rise; the same move attempted a year or two later, he argued, would have frightened customers and staff.

In October 2025 the holding company dropped Concordia and became Yokohama Financial Group. Eight years of integration had made the neutral name redundant, and Kataoka’s reasoning was plain: it told nobody, at home or abroad, that this was a regional banking group, whereas the core bank’s name did. For the year to March 2025 the group reported ordinary income of ¥399.1 billion and net profit of ¥82.8 billion. A bank set up in 1920 to bury two failures had ended up putting its own name over the largest regional banking group in the country.