Twenty-six areas and a geographic information system, against the city banks (1996)

Holding the region as a surface, not a set of branches

The heart of this decision was a regional bank’s attempt to meet nationwide city banks with a surface. The old “mini city bank” line had chased them on scale; the return home switched the thinking to binding Kanagawa into 26 areas and holding each one firmly. The geographic information system was the tool that put customer distribution — data — behind branch siting and sales work that had run on instinct and habit. It was an attempt to push the slogan of local commitment down into how the organization moved and how it used what it knew.

How much the strategy did for market share or earnings in the prefecture is, admittedly, hard to measure on its own. Behind the return home, the bad loans of the “mini city bank” years weighed heavily, and across 1998–99 the Bank of Yokohama took ¥220 billion of public funds. Even so, the idea of treating Kanagawa as a surface — binding it finely and defending it piece by piece — runs all the way to the three-bank structure created by the acquisition of the Kanagawa Bank in 2023. How does a regional bank hold its own against a nationwide network? In the mid-1990s the Bank of Yokohama offered one answer: by binding its region tightly together.