Company history

Fuji Bank traced its line to Yasuda Zenjiro, a money-changer who opened the Yasudaya house in Edo’s Nihonbashi in 1864 and, in 1880, joined traders and fellow money-changers to found the Yasuda Bank. Through the Meiji decades it lent heavily to harbours, railways and electric power and handled government cash so widely that it was known as the bank of public money. In 1923, in the banking shake-out after the Great Kanto Earthquake, eleven Yasuda-affiliated banks were fused into one — then the largest bank in Japan, with ¥542m in deposits and 210 branches. Broken up in the postwar dissolution of the zaibatsu, it deliberately kept the Fuji name rather than reverting to Yasuda when the occupation ended, declaring itself a bank remade around mass retail, and later added US commercial finance by buying the lender Heller in 1984.

The Industrial Bank of Japan was a creature of the state: a special bank set up under a dedicated 1900 law and opened in 1902 with ¥1m in capital under its first governor, Soeda Juichi, to channel long-term money into the heavy and chemical industries that private commercial banks would not touch. It built the country’s early corporate-bond market — taking nearly half of all debenture issuance in its first decade — and financed steel, electric power, railways and shipbuilding through the pre-war and high-growth eras. Converted to an ordinary bank in 1950 and then to a long-term credit bank in 1952, it supplied the plant-and-equipment money that rebuilt Japanese industry, until the 1991 Toyo Shinkin affair — reckless lending to the Osaka restaurateur Onoue Nui — forced it to pull back from new borrowers and deepen the clients it already had.

The third root, Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, was itself the product of a 1971 merger of Dai-Ichi and Nippon Kangyo and carried the largest branch network and deepest pool of household deposits in postwar Japan — but a 1997 payoff scandal involving corporate racketeers forced out its board and left it in a governance crisis. By the late 1990s all three were cornered by the same forces: bad loans left by the bursting of the bubble, an interest-rate slide toward zero, and — for the long-term lenders — a funding model undercut by rate liberalisation and shrinking demand for bank debentures. When the government nationalised the Long-Term Credit Bank and the Nippon Credit Bank in 1998, the dead end of the long-term-credit model was plain to all, and none of the three could see a path to surviving alone. Bundling the industrial IBJ, the public-money-and-retail Fuji and the giant city bank Dai-Ichi Kangyo into a single world-scale group first became a real option here.

In September 2000 Dai-Ichi Kangyo, Fuji and the Industrial Bank of Japan placed themselves under a joint holding company, Mizuho Holdings, creating a bank that ranked among the largest in the world by assets — the biggest reshaping of postwar Japanese finance. In January 2003 the group was recast as Mizuho Financial Group, gathering the banking, trust and securities companies under one financial holding company, with Terunobu Maeda as its first president. The banner was scale: a full-service financial group that could offer everything, everywhere, at world size.

The promise cracked almost at once. In April 2002 the cut-over of the core banking systems triggered nationwide ATM stoppages, double debits and delayed direct debits, and the Financial Services Agency issued an immediate business-improvement order. The cause lay in the integration design itself: rather than choose which bank’s core system would be the backbone, Mizuho had kept the old Dai-Ichi Kangyo and Fuji systems running and merely wired them together, and the relay-computer scheme buckled under the load. Deferring the one hard decision — whose system was primary — to spare the pride of each predecessor bank exposed, on day one, how weak the holding company’s grip really was. From its first month Mizuho carried a structural flaw that would resurface, in systems and in culture, again and again.

The 2008 Lehman shock hit banks holding securitised subprime exposure, and in the year to March 2009 Mizuho booked a net loss of $6.3B (¥589bn); its capital was the thinnest of the three megabanks, forcing repeated share issues to rebuild it, and Takashi Tsukamoto took over as president that June. Then, in March 2011, a second failure struck: a flood of earthquake-relief transfers piled into a single account, the overnight batch overflowed, and double debits and ATM outages cascaded across the country — a decade after integration, and a second FSA order. Yasuhiro Sato became president in June 2011. Two breakdowns had now shown that the model of running two banks in parallel — Mizuho Bank for individuals, Mizuho Corporate Bank for large companies — had reached its limit.

In July 2013, thirteen years after integration, Mizuho Bank and Mizuho Corporate Bank finally merged into a single One Bank, dissolving the two-bank split that had doubled both governance and IT. The group moved the same year to a nominating-committee board structure, separating oversight from execution. In 2015 it absorbed the Royal Bank of Scotland’s North American loan book and staff — a foothold for the Americas corporate-and-investment-banking business that Mizuho would lean on as a domestic retail market shrank under a falling population and near-zero rates.

The core-system integration deferred since 2000 was at last rebuilt from scratch as MINORI — a service-oriented platform that replaced the three separate legacy cores, built over some 350,000 person-months and more than $4.1B (¥450bn), and fully live by July 2019, nineteen years after the merger. Alongside it, in the year to March 2019 Mizuho took structural-reform and securities-portfolio losses in one pass, and net profit fell 83% to $885.8M (¥97bn). Tatsufumi Sakai, president from April 2018, framed this not as a cure but as ground-clearing for a deeper shift — away from a model living on interest income toward fees and overseas corporate-and-investment banking.

Then the irony landed. Barely eighteen months after MINORI went live, Mizuho Bank suffered a run of failures in 2021 — eight over the year: ATMs swallowing cards and passbooks, halted branch and online transactions, stalled foreign-exchange transfers — and drew fresh orders from both the FSA and the Ministry of Finance. The nineteen-year system had become the stage for a third breakdown, after 2002 and 2011. The post-mortems found not only technical faults but an organisation in which trouble on the floor did not travel up to management and the first response came too late — proof that renewing the machinery had not cured the governance legacy of three banks kept side by side. Sakai stepped down, and in February 2022 Masahiro Kihara took over with a mandate to change the culture itself.

Having reached the end of the road of assembling every capability in-house — the road that ran through One Bank and MINORI — Mizuho switched to buying growth from outside. In 2023 it acquired the US advisory firm Greenhill, gaining about 370 bankers and, with them, a genuine entry into the American M&A-advice market where it had long held little share. It was the piece its US business had always lacked: having pushed into American debt through bond underwriting, Mizuho bought the advisory function outright rather than spend a decade growing one.

At home it took a 49% stake in Rakuten Securities and invested in Rakuten Card, pairing a face-to-face bank with an online broker rather than absorbing it; abroad it moved into private credit alongside the US manager Golub Capital. The money came from unwinding its policy shareholdings, a programme running since 2015 that has sold more than $2.1B (¥300bn) of cross-held stock and redirected the proceeds into growth investment and shareholder returns. Ordinary income reached record highs by the year to March 2025 — but whether buying capability from outside finally settles the twenty-five-year question of how to make one bank out of three will be told, as ever at Mizuho, in the years still to come.