SBI began in July 1999 as the venture-capital arm SoftBank carved out of itself, and spent its first six years turning that single line of business into something far wider. Revenue of $432.5M (¥47bn) in the year to March 2000 came almost entirely from investments in unlisted shares and from managing funds, and when the American IT bubble broke in 2001 that dependence showed itself as violent swings in earnings; by absorbing the group’s online brokerage in 2003, renaming itself SBI Holdings in 2005 and reaching $739.9M (¥82bn) of revenue that year, the company set out on the path that would take it out of SoftBank’s orbit altogether.
A venture-capital subsidiary raised at Son’s request by a Nomura man
In July 1999 Kitao Yoshitaka (北尾吉孝), then a managing director of the SoftBank group, established SoftBank Investment Corporation in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo at the request of Son Masayoshi (孫正義), and became its president and representative director. Kitao had joined Nomura Securities in 1974 and worked in investment banking — including a spell as a managing director at Wasserstein Perella International in London — before moving to SoftBank as a managing director in 1995. SoftBank, in the middle of a rapid expansion of its internet businesses, had adopted a policy of carving the group’s venture-capital function out into a separate legal entity; in November, immediately after the new company was formed, SoftBank Ventures, Soft Trend Capital and others were taken in as wholly owned subsidiaries through share exchanges, giving the VC business its structure. In December 2000, the year after its founding, the company listed on the Nasdaq Japan market of the Osaka Securities Exchange, establishing a fundraising base as an independent entity.
At the outset SoftBank Investment’s field of business was limited to investment in unlisted shares and the management of investment funds. Riding the internet investment boom of the late 1990s, the company grew into the early 2000s on capital gains from the flotations of its investees and on fees for arranging funds. The collapse of the American IT bubble in 2001 sent the share prices of those investees down sharply, however, and the sheer size of the earnings swings inherent in a stand-alone VC business turned into a problem of management. Over 2001 and 2002 Kitao, conscious of the need to move away from an earnings structure standing on venture capital alone, shared with the board a policy of extending into adjacent financial fields such as settlement, financial services and the securities business. In February 2002 the company listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in November of the same year it moved from Nasdaq Japan to the First Section of the Osaka Securities Exchange as well, completing its institutional footing as a listed company.
Absorbing E*Trade, and the idea of a strong financial conglomerate
In June 2003 SoftBank Investment absorbed E*Trade Japan, another SoftBank group company, taking the online brokerages E*Trade Securities and SoftBank Frontier Securities in as subsidiaries. Kitao became representative director and CEO at this point and began recasting the company into something like a holding company, binding securities and financial services together with the VC business. E*Trade Securities, opened in 1999, was one of Japan’s earliest online brokerages and had been increasing its retail accounts rapidly through a low-price strategy on equity brokerage commissions. The merger placed the capital gains of the VC business and the trading commissions of an online broker under a single listed company, and that structure became the starting point of what the SBI group would later call its strong financial conglomerate (強い金融コングロマリット). Finance All followed as a subsidiary in February 2004 and Morningstar Japan, an investment-information and fund-rating company, in July, bringing settlement and investment information into the fold as well.
In July 2005 the company changed its trade name to SBI Holdings, Inc. and at the same time carried out a reorganisation into a holding-company structure. The VC business was split off and transferred to SBI Ventures — successor to the former SoftBank Ventures, renamed SBI Investment in October of that year — while SBI Holdings took the role of a holding company overseeing operating subsidiaries in securities, banking, insurance and venture capital. In the same month as the name change, World Nichiei Frontier Securities was also renamed SBI Securities, carrying the unification of the SBI brand a step further. The letters stand for Strategic Business Innovator; the new name set out publicly a view of the business as an independent financial group, away from its origins as a venture-capital subsidiary under SoftBank. Between 2006 and 2008 the capital relationship with SoftBank was progressively unwound, and the separation from Son Masayoshi’s SoftBank group into an independent financial group led by Kitao was effectively complete.
2007SBI Japannext opens the Japannext night-time PTS
2007SBI Sumishin Net Bank opens for business
2008SBI Insurance begins internet-only motor cover
2011Hong Kong Depositary Receipts listed on the HKEX Main Board
2012SBI AXES lists on the Korean KOSDAQ market
2013Hyundai Swiss Savings Bank of Korea becomes a subsidiary
2014The Hong Kong Depositary Receipts are delisted
2015PCA Life Insurance becomes a subsidiary
2016Memorandum with Ripple opens the crypto-asset business
2018SBI Insurance Group lists on TSE Mothers
The years from 2006 to 2018 were spent turning a single online brokerage into a full line of online financial businesses: an online bank and an online motor insurer opened within two years of each other, life assurance and a Korean savings bank followed, and by FY17 the financial-services businesses were producing six-tenths of group revenue in recurring fees and spreads — exactly the counterweight to the swings of venture capital that Kitao had wanted. By the end of the period that same earnings base was being pointed at a new target: the regional banks whose own earnings were being ground down by negative interest rates and a falling population.
SBI Sumishin Net Bank, SBI Insurance and the convenience store of online finance
In May 2006 SBI Holdings established the preparatory company that became SBI Insurance Co., Ltd. In July of that year E*Trade Securities was renamed SBI E*Trade Securities, and in September 2007 SBI Sumishin Net Bank, a joint venture with Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, opened for business. In January 2008 SBI Insurance began writing motor insurance entirely over the internet, so that in a little over two years the three pillars were all in place: an online broker (SBI E*Trade Securities), an online bank (SBI Sumishin Net Bank) and an online non-life insurer (SBI Insurance). Kitao called this structure a convenience store of online finance (ネット金融コンビニ), and adopted a policy of building an experience in which a retail customer could use securities, banking and insurance services across the group, through linked accounts and shared information between the group companies. In July of the same year the former E*Trade Securities was renamed SBI SECURITIES Co., Ltd., advancing the unification of the brand another stage.
In its venture-capital days SoftBank Investment had depended for earnings on flotation gains from its investees and on management fees, but the financial-services businesses assembled in 2007 and 2008 had a structure that generated fee and spread income of a recurring kind. SBI Securities’ equity brokerage commissions, SBI Sumishin Net Bank’s spread on mortgage rates and SBI Insurance’s premium income all accumulated in proportion to the number of customer accounts, and acted as a buffer against the cyclical swings of the VC business. Consolidated revenue for FY09, the year to March 2010, came to only $1.4B (¥125bn), with profit attributable to owners of the parent of $26.2M (¥2bn), but the ground was prepared for the financial-services businesses to grow over the following decade into an earnings base carrying more than half of consolidated revenue. The VC business on its own fell from a net profit of $40.9M (¥4bn) the previous year to a loss of ¥18.3bn in the global financial crisis of 2008, and it was the recurring income of the financial-services businesses that supported the return to profit in FY09.
Consolidating SBI Savings Bank in Korea and extending the platform abroad
In April 2011 SBI Holdings listed Hong Kong Depositary Receipts, with its ordinary shares as the underlying, on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, widening its route to funding from institutional investors across Asia. In December 2012 SBI AXES Co., Ltd. — now SBI FinTech Solutions Co., Ltd. — listed on the Korean KOSDAQ market, the first overseas listing by a group company. In March 2013 SBI Holdings acquired 99.0 per cent of Hyundai Swiss Savings Bank of Korea, now SBI Savings Bank, and consolidated it as a subsidiary. At the time of the acquisition Hyundai Swiss Savings Bank was in difficulty and still working through bad loans; to improve its BIS ratio and restore its earnings, Kitao put a resident management structure in place in Korea, sending an executive from SBI Holdings to take charge and set the governance in order. Losses from the disposal of bad loans continued for several years after consolidation, but by the second half of the 2010s the bank had reached a leading position in the Korean savings-bank industry.
In June 2014 the HDRs were delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a withdrawal chosen after reconsidering the cost of maintaining liquidity in the Hong Kong equity market. In February 2015 SBI Holdings consolidated PCA Life Insurance Co., Ltd. — now SBI Life Insurance Co., Ltd. — adding life assurance to the group of online financial services. In September 2018 SBI Insurance Group Co., Ltd. listed on the Mothers market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, standing on its own as an insurance holding company binding together non-life, life and small-amount short-term insurance. Alongside the initial three pillars of SBI Securities, SBI Sumishin Net Bank and SBI Insurance came SBI Savings Bank in Korea, SBI Life Insurance and SBI Insurance Group in turn, and in FY17, the year to March 2018, external revenue from the financial-services business reached $2.0B (¥217bn) with segment profit of $577.9M (¥64bn) — six-tenths of group revenue, and the core business of the group.
The fourth megabank, and preparing the regional-bank alliances
In June 2018 Kitao, continuing to run the group as president and representative director, shared with the board a policy of accelerating capital and business alliances with regional banks. The regional banking industry was seeing its earnings base worn thin by the twin pressures of the negative-interest-rate policy and a falling population, and SBI Holdings set out a plan to rebuild the financial foundations of regional economies and extend the group into the regions at the same time, through comprehensive alliances combining systems provision, operational support and the purchase of shares. In FY18, the year to March 2019, the fourth megabank (第4のメガバンク) concept was worked out concretely inside the company and the framework for capital and business alliances with regional banks was put in place. Consolidated revenue for FY18 was $3.2B (¥351bn) with profit attributable to owners of the parent of $481.6M (¥53bn), a further hardening of the structure in which the earnings base of online financial services carried the whole group.
SBI Securities’ domestic online brokerage accounts grew from 4.15 million at the end of March 2017 to 4.65 million at the end of March 2019, and SBI Sumishin Net Bank’s accounts from 2.78 million to 3.87 million over the same period, so that the customer base of the three online financial pillars kept expanding at around 10 per cent a year. In interviews through 2018 and 2019 Kitao explained repeatedly that the group would use the earnings base of its online financial businesses to move to the support of regional banks, making clear that SBI Holdings’ regional-bank tie-ups were not one-off investments but a medium- to long-term strategy aimed at rebuilding the financial infrastructure of regional economies. As of FY18 the group had 249 consolidated subsidiaries and bases in 16 countries and territories, and was building out a global financial platform in parallel, including minority stakes in financial institutions overseas.
From 2019 SBI put capital into regional banks one at a time, and in 2021 took the step that gave the alliance a core: a tender offer that brought Shinsei Bank — a formerly nationalised long-term credit bank still carrying unrepaid public money — into the group. The negative goodwill that came with it produced the largest profit in the company’s history, while the debt to the state came with it too, and once that money was repaid in 2025 the bank was let go again.
From Shimane Bank and Fukushima Bank to a regional-bank alliance
In September 2019, starting with Shimane Bank, SBI Holdings began putting capital and business alliances with regional banks into effect one after another. With Fukushima Bank in November 2019, Chikuho Bank in March 2020, Shimizu Bank in June 2020 and Towa Bank in June 2020, SBI Holdings settled on a framework combining the purchase of shares in a regional bank — typically a stake of the order of 10 to 20 per cent — with systems provision, operational support and support in managing securities portfolios. Consolidated revenue for FY19, the year to March 2020, was $3.4B (¥368bn) with profit attributable to owners of the parent of $351.2M (¥38bn), earnings held up even in financial markets in the middle of the spread of COVID-19. At the centre of the tie-ups was a method of sharing SBI Securities’ investment expertise to improve the banks’ returns on their securities portfolios, and Kitao, by then chairman as well as president, explained repeatedly in public that a recovery in the earning power of regional banks leads directly to the regeneration of regional economies.
The case for regional-bank consolidation put forward by Suga Yoshihide (菅義偉) in the Liberal Democratic Party presidential election of September 2020 gave political backing to SBI Holdings’ regional-bank alliance. The company’s tie-ups grew past ten banks over 2020 and 2021, and consolidated revenue for FY20, the year to March 2021, was $4.9B (¥541bn) with profit attributable to owners of the parent of $738.8M (¥81bn). Retail investment demand from the home expanded under the pandemic and SBI Securities’ accounts rose past the five million mark. Over the same period the crypto-asset business centred on SBI VC Trade grew rapidly, and the FY20 shareholder benefit programme added the crypto-asset XRP, worth $73 (¥8,000), as a new item — the group’s portfolio widening at a stroke from traditional financial products to crypto-assets and a regional-bank alliance.
The Shinsei Bank tender offer succeeds, and the fourth megabank begins
In September 2021 SBI Holdings carried through a tender offer for the shares of Shinsei Bank, and in December of that year consolidated Shinsei Bank as a subsidiary. Shinsei Bank was a formerly state-owned bank whose predecessor, a long-term credit bank established in 1952, had failed in 2000, been temporarily nationalised and then set out again as a private bank; it carried the unresolved problem of roughly $3.2B (¥350bn) of public money still unrepaid. SBI Holdings raised its stake in Shinsei Bank past 20 per cent before launching the tender offer, and after negotiations with Shinsei Bank’s management had the proposal to appoint directors carried at an extraordinary general meeting in December 2021. With that SBI Holdings brought Shinsei Bank under its wing and turned itself into a financial group holding traditional commercial banking alongside online broking, online banking, non-life insurance and life assurance. Shinsei Bank changed its trade name to SBI Shinsei Bank in December 2022 and was built into the structure as the core function of the regional-bank alliance.
FY21, the year to March 2022, in which negative goodwill of $1.5B (¥196bn) arising on the consolidation of Shinsei Bank was recognised, produced consolidated revenue of $5.8B (¥764bn) and profit attributable to owners of the parent of $2.8B (¥367bn) — the largest profit SBI Holdings had recorded since its founding. In the same year ARUHI Corporation, a mortgage brokerage, was also consolidated, expanding the mortgage business in parallel. In FY22, the year to March 2023, the disappearance of the negative goodwill and worsening market conditions in the crypto-asset business compressed profit, but with a full year’s contribution from the Shinsei Bank business, consolidated revenue was $6.8B (¥957bn) and profit attributable to owners of the parent $251.9M (¥35bn). Shinsei Bank’s loan book to corporate customers and the securities-portfolio support given to the regional-bank alliance were built into SBI Holdings’ earnings base as new pillars. In FY23, the year to March 2024, consolidated revenue was $8.0B (¥1.21tn) and profit attributable to owners of the parent $575.6M (¥87bn), the business structure after the consolidation of Shinsei Bank settling towards a steady state.
Into semiconductors, and recasting the portfolio for the next generation
From 2023 SBI Holdings began investing directly in semiconductor manufacturing, taking a stake in Power chip Japan, the Japanese plant of Taiwan’s PSMC, among others. Kitao, chairman and president, set out a policy that the group would concentrate on manufacturing, semiconductors among them, as well as on finance, and pushed into taking part in manufacturing in order to create employment and income directly in regional economies. The next-generation business segment, created in FY22, the year to March 2023, is a development field binding together Web3, digital securities (STO), regional-revitalisation projects and the semiconductor business, and in FY24, the year to March 2025, it recorded external revenue of $204.5M (¥31bn) and a segment loss of ¥9.9bn. The next-generation business is in a phase of development in which losses will continue for the time being, and the structure adopted is one in which the earnings of the crypto-asset business (FY24 external revenue $539.3M (¥81bn), profit $141.7M (¥21bn)) and of the financial-services business (FY24 external revenue $8.0B (¥1.2tn), profit $1.5B (¥225bn)) carry the group as a whole.
After the roughly ¥350bn of public money in Shinsei Bank was repaid in full in July 2025, SBI Holdings sold shares in SBI Shinsei Bank in September of that year and carried out a reorganisation moving the bank to an equity-method affiliate outside the consolidated group. The decision was taken with an eye to a relisting after repayment, and in order to put in place measures preventing conflicts of interest with minority shareholders; the scale of SBI Holdings on a consolidated basis shrank, but the transparency and independence of the Shinsei Bank business were raised. From FY25, the year to March 2026, the group adopted a five-segment structure — financial services, crypto-assets, next-generation businesses, investment and asset management — on a basis that excludes Shinsei Bank. At FY24, its twenty-fifth year, the customer base had reached 50.50 million accounts, consolidated employees 19,156 and consolidated subsidiaries 721: in twenty-five years the company had gone from the single venture-capital business that SoftBank Investment was at its founding in July 1999 to a financial group binding together online finance, a regional-bank alliance, crypto-assets and semiconductors.
The turning points, read in full: what was at stake, what was chosen and what the revenue did around it. The Japanese edition is the edition of record and carries the sourced dossier behind each decision — background, options weighed, outcome — linked under every decision.
Revenue (¥ bn) · net margin % · around FY2005
Key decision · 2005
Capital independence from SoftBank and the making of the SBI brand (2005)
What the independence of a financial subsidiary meant
The core of this decision lies in the point that a financial subsidiary, once grown, cut itself away from its parent’s credit risk and strategy. For SoftBank, selling the SBI shares came from a financial necessity — compressing the interest-bearing debt swollen by the Vodafone acquisition. For Kitao Yoshitaka, on the other side, remaining under a parent carrying excessive borrowings was itself a constraint on running a licensed business such as finance. The distinguishing feature of this parting is that the parent’s need for funds and the subsidiary’s wish for independence coincided within the same transaction.
The separation of capital did not, however, sever the relationship. Son Masayoshi and Kitao Yoshitaka went on cooperating in settlement and investment and kept their standing as allies. The SBI Holdings that Kitao led once independent widened its businesses from online broking and online banking into tie-ups with regional banks, crypto-assets and semiconductors, and consolidated revenue passed ¥1.4trn in the year to March 2025. Moving away from its origins as one financial subsidiary of SoftBank, it chose its own course as an independent full-line financial group — and that decision, taken across 2005 and 2006, was the fork in the road that determined the shape SBI would take thereafter.
Consolidating E*Trade into the leading online brokerage (2006)
The author’s view
This reorganisation was not a flamboyant piece of takeover drama but the accumulation of three plain steps: a change of trade name, a merger and a share exchange. Its meaning is not small for that. Removing the E*Trade name, born of a joint venture, in stages; taking in a face-to-face branch network; unwinding a parent-child listing so that all the profit came in — it can be seen as the work of moving online broking, a business still young at the time, into place as the backbone of the group. Set alongside the capital independence from SoftBank in the same period, these were two years in which SBI handed back what it had borrowed, in both capital and brand.
Almost everything SBI has done since rests on the account base that consolidation produced. The liquidity of the night-time PTS, the flow of customers into the online bank, and an earnings structure that still stands after commissions were abolished in 2023 were all moves that could only be drawn with the largest customer base in the market. At the same time, scale does not end competition, as the fact that Rakuten Securities announced it would follow on the very day of the zero-commission announcement makes plain. How to assemble earnings in an age of zero commissions while keeping the leading position is a question that lies at the far end of a single line running from this reorganisation.
Founding SBI Sumishin Net Bank and entering online banking (2005)
The author’s view
SBI’s strength lay less in making any single business win than in the design that wove securities, banking, insurance and investment into one economic sphere. SBI Sumishin Net Bank was an early move on that blueprint, giving money that had stopped at the brokerage account an outlet in deposits and mortgages. The choice to own a bank rather than borrow one became the premise that later stretched the group’s reach as far as the regional-bank alliance and the crypto-asset business.
It cannot be said, however, that the idea of a fourth axis bore fruit in the form first imagined. SBI Sumishin Net Bank listed on its own in 2023 and, in capital terms, converged on the position of one subsidiary within the group. What stands in front now is less the original story of a counterweight to the megabanks than the figure of an independent bank earning its living from mortgages and technology. How the idea came to land in the reality of the business is still at the stage of being watched.
The fourth megabank and the forming of a regional-bank alliance (2019)
A wager on a distributed banking alliance, bound one bank at a time by capital
The core of this decision lies in the way it laid the regeneration of regional banks and SBI’s own growth over one another within a single concept. The same headwind — low interest rates and a falling population — appeared to the regional banks as the drying up of earnings and to SBI as a shortage of customer contact points across the country. Kitao chose a framework that could be told both as a story of rescuing regional banks and as a story of SBI working its way into the regions. Beginning with the investment in Shimane Bank and binding one bank after another by capital had a speed and a texture quite unlike the conventional banking consolidation that integrates everything at once through a large merger.
The design of a distributed alliance, easier to accept because it leaves the regional banks their autonomy, is the other face of a weak power to hold them together. Chikuho Bank’s departure shows that an alliance bound only by capital can come undone. Now that it has a core in Shinsei Bank, the task left to SBI is whether it can work a network of tie-ups that has reached ten banks into a single financial base on a national scale. Who is to support regional finance, and how — to that unavoidable question in a Japan whose population keeps falling, SBI’s regional-bank alliance offers one answer from the private sector.
Acquiring Shinsei Bank: an all-but-hostile tender offer, and unrepaid public money (2021)
Winning a core bank, and taking on a national piece of homework
The core of this acquisition lies in the fact that SBI obtained, through a tender offer close to a show of force, the core bank its regional-alliance concept had lacked. A bid launched without prior agreement had no precedent in the banking industry, and Shinsei Bank resisted with a takeover-defence measure. What settled the contest, however, was neither the market nor the management but the state, which held about 20 per cent of the voting rights. The moment the state decided not to vote for the defence measure, Shinsei Bank’s resistance lost any prospect of succeeding. In a bank where the state is deeply involved in the capital through public money, this episode shows that where control ends up is decided by a logic different from that of an ordinary corporate acquisition.
Winning a core bank was, even so, of a piece with a heavy assignment: repayment. The roughly ¥350bn of public money still outstanding at the time of the acquisition was difficult to repay in full under the constraints of share price and dividends, and SBI sought room to face the state by taking the bank private. Read the other way, as long as the state remained a shareholder the company was carrying a bank it could never make entirely its own. The decision by an SBI that had started from online broking to take on the successor to a failed long-term credit bank, and the national problem of that repayment with it, reflects at once the strength of its will to complete the regional-bank alliance and the size of the price that came with it.
SBI Securities’ Zero Revolution: domestic equity commissions abolished for good (2023)
Throwing away the commissions, wagering on the customer base
The core of this decision lies in the point that SBI threw away trading commissions — one of its largest sources of income — of its own accord, while they were still producing profit. Online brokerage commissions were being pushed towards zero in a competition of price cuts and were fated to lose their power to differentiate. SBI Securities moved to abolish them before it could be cornered into doing so late, and chose to maximise the customer base of accounts in exchange for the commissions it gave up. By timing the move to coincide with the change in the tax-free investment regime, the new NISA, abolition became not merely a matter of price competition but a move to enclose that base while widening the reach of investing.
Whether the wager comes off depends on how much of the customers gathered can be turned into earnings. Margin-lending interest, foreign exchange, investment trusts, the flow of customers to other group companies — unless the pillars of income that replace commissions all turn together, abolition becomes a drain on strength. Once commissions are zero, the difference between firms moves to range, service and the depth of the group, and the value of a brokerage shifts from intermediating trades to holding the customer base itself. SBI Securities’ Zero Revolution remains as the decision that put that question to every online broker in the country.
This English edition follows the Japanese one chapter by chapter. The Japanese edition remains the edition of record: it carries the source-by-source citations, the financial tables and the shareholder and executive records. 日本語版（詳細）— SBI Holdings full history in Japanese →
SBI Holdings, Inc. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports), 統合報告書 (integrated reports) and アニュアルレポート (annual reports).