Company history

SBI began in July 1999 as a spin-out. Yoshitaka Kitao, then a managing director of SoftBank, set up SoftBank Investment Corporation in Tokyo at Masayoshi Son’s request and became its president. Kitao had joined Nomura Securities in 1974, done investment banking in London — a managing director at Wasserstein Perella International — and moved to SoftBank as a managing director in 1995. Amid the internet boom, SoftBank was carving its group venture-capital function out as a standalone company, and the new firm listed on the Osaka Nasdaq Japan market in December 2000. Its business was narrow: unlisted-equity investment and fund management, earning on portfolio IPO gains and fund-formation fees — earnings that rose with the market and fell just as hard with it.

The dot-com crash of 2001 exposed how violently a venture-capital-only earnings base could swing, and Kitao began pushing beyond it into settlement, financial services and brokerage. The company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section in February 2002. The decisive turn came in June 2003, when SoftBank Investment absorbed the group affiliate E*Trade Japan and took in E*Trade Securities — a first-wave online broker, opened in 1999, that had grown individual accounts fast on rock-bottom trading commissions. Placing venture-capital gains and online-broker commissions under one listed roof was the seed of what SBI would later call a “strong financial conglomerate.”

In July 2005 the company renamed itself SBI Holdings and shifted to a pure holding-company structure over its securities, banking, insurance and venture-capital subsidiaries. “SBI” stood for Strategic Business Innovator — a signal that it was leaving behind its origin as a SoftBank venture subsidiary. Over 2006–2008 the capital ties to SoftBank were unwound, completing the separation of Kitao’s independent financial group from Son’s SoftBank.

With securities in hand, SBI assembled the rest of a self-contained online financial group at speed. It set up the forerunner of SBI Insurance in 2006; SBI Sumishin Net Bank, a joint venture with Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, opened in September 2007; and SBI Insurance began internet-only auto insurance in January 2008. Within a little over two years the three pillars — online broker, online bank and online non-life insurer — were in place. Kitao called the structure a “net financial convenience store,” designed so that a retail customer could move across securities, banking and insurance through linked accounts.

The strategic point was the change in the shape of earnings. Where the old venture business had lived on IPO gains and fund fees, the 2007–2008 financial-services businesses generated stock-like fee and spread income — brokerage commissions, mortgage-rate spreads, insurance premiums — that accrued in proportion to account numbers and buffered the swings of investing. The 2008 global financial crisis dropped the venture business into a net loss, but the financial-services stock income carried the group back to profit the next year, and over the following decade financial services grew to more than half of consolidated revenue.

SBI then extended the platform abroad and deepened it at home. It acquired Korea’s troubled Hyundai Swiss Savings Bank (now SBI Savings Bank) in 2013 at a 99% stake and nursed it through years of bad-debt losses to a top-tier position in Korea; it added life insurance — PCA Life, now SBI Life — in 2015, and spun the insurers out as the listed SBI Insurance Group in 2018. By the year ended March 2018 financial services earned external revenue of $2.0B (¥217bn) and had become the group’s core, and Kitao had begun preparing a capital-and-business-alliance push into Japan’s ailing regional banks.

From September 2019 SBI began taking capital stakes in regional banks — Shimane Bank first, then Fukushima (2019), Chikuho, Shimizu and Towa (2020) and more — pairing a 10–20% shareholding with systems, operations and securities-management support. Rather than the big-bang mergers of past bank restructurings, SBI bound the banks one at a time, sharing SBI Securities’ investment know-how to lift the partners’ returns on their securities portfolios. Kitao framed it as inseparable from regional revival: restore the regional banks’ earning power, he argued, and you restore the local economies themselves.

The idea drew a political tailwind when Yoshihide Suga, campaigning for the LDP presidency in September 2020, made regional-bank consolidation a theme. SBI’s alliance passed ten banks over 2020–2021, and the pandemic-era surge in household investing pushed SBI Securities past five million accounts. A crypto-asset business built around SBI VC Trade grew fast alongside — SBI even added the token XRP to its shareholder perks — stretching the portfolio from traditional products to crypto and a bank network in one motion.

The alliance still lacked a core bank of its own — and in September 2021 SBI won one, carrying a tender offer for Shinsei Bank to success and consolidating it that December. Shinsei, successor to a former long-term-credit bank nationalized after its 2000 collapse, came with about $3.2B (¥350bn) of public money still unrepaid. SBI’s was a near-hostile bid with no prior agreement — unprecedented in Japanese banking — and it was decided not by the market or the board but by the state, which held roughly a fifth of the votes and declined to back Shinsei’s defense.

Consolidating Shinsei booked a $1.5B (¥196bn) negative-goodwill gain and drove record net profit of $2.8B (¥367bn) for the year ended March 2022 — the largest in SBI’s history. Shinsei was renamed SBI Shinsei Bank in December 2022 and slotted in as the core of the regional-bank alliance, adding traditional commercial banking to the online broker, bank and insurers SBI already ran.

From 2023 SBI pushed beyond finance into manufacturing, investing directly in semiconductors — a stake in Taiwan-linked Powerchip’s Japan venture (PSMC) — with Kitao arguing that making things, chips among them, would create jobs and income in the regions the way finance alone could not. It also detonated a price war at home: in 2023 SBI Securities made Japanese stock-trading commissions permanently free — its “Zero Revolution” — throwing away its largest revenue source while still profitable, to maximize accounts as the new NISA widened the investing public.

Then, in September 2025, SBI reversed its biggest acquisition: it sold down SBI Shinsei Bank into an equity-method affiliate, deconsolidating the very bank whose purchase had produced its record profit. The move was meant to handle Shinsei’s still-outstanding public funds and to avoid conflicts of interest with minority shareholders — SBI could not make the bank fully its own while the state remained in its capital. Deconsolidated, SBI now arranges itself into five businesses — financial services, crypto-assets, next-generation, investment and asset management — nursing its crypto arm (the UK’s B2C2) and its semiconductor bets on the earnings that SBI Securities and SBI Sumishin Net Bank throw off. Twenty-five years on from a one-company venture business, SBI spanned online finance, a bank alliance, crypto and chips, with a customer base above 50 million.