Company history

Acom’s customers were office workers, and office workers cannot easily borrow money during the hours a bank is open. So the company set out to earn on the hours and places banks did not cover. In December 1979 it installed the industry’s first round-the-clock, 365-day ATM at its Ginza branch, at a time when bank cash machines shut in the evening and stayed dark all weekend. Differentiating on operating hours rather than on rate or location was a modest-sounding idea with a long tail: it was the first appearance of the automation instinct that would define the company. In December 1983, as the Money Lending Business Control Act took effect in response to the social damage done by the loan-shark boom, Acom registered with the Kanto Local Finance Bureau — the industry’s first move from laissez-faire into supervision, and confirmation that the pawnshop offshoot was now a national lender in its own right.

The instinct became an invention in July 1993, when Acom put the first automated contract machines — Mujinkun — into Shinjuku and Hakata. A customer fed identity documents into a scanner, exchanged a few words with an operator over the screen, and walked out with a signed contract in about five minutes. Branches that had signed roughly forty contracts a month were now signing on the order of a hundred, the machines ran at night and on holidays, and running costs fell to something like 30% of a staffed branch. President Kinoshita, judging that the industry as a whole would grow faster if the technique spread, chose not to patent it — and the competition duly copied it. Acom had already broadened its range the year before by absorbing NSK Shinpan, adding instalment credit, golf-membership-secured lending and corporate loans to the unsecured book.

Capital followed. Acom registered its shares over the counter with the Japan Securities Dealers Association in October 1993, moved to the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 1994 and to the First Section in September 1996 — three steps in two and a half years, which funded the national roll-out of Mujinkun. The same month it opened abroad, forming the Bangkok hire-purchase joint venture SIAM A&C (renamed EASY BUY in 2005 and still the core of the overseas business). In 1998 it became a MasterCard principal member, issuing cards from 1999. And from 2001 it began circling the banks: a jointly owned loan company, Tokyo-Mitsubishi Cash One, then in March 2004 a strategic capital and business alliance with Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group — the opening of the relationship that would decide the company’s fate.

In January 2006 the Supreme Court ruled that the “grey-zone” interest consumer lenders had charged for decades — the band between the 15–20% ceiling of the Interest Rate Restriction Act and the 29.2% ceiling of the Capital Subscription Act — was void. That December the revised Money Lending Business Act settled the consequence: interest collected in the band became overpayment, repayable on demand. Acom cut its own ceiling rate from 27.35% to 18.0% in June 2007 and provisioned for the refunds in a single stroke. The year to March 2007 carried about ¥350bn of extraordinary losses and a net loss of $3.7B (¥438bn) — a swing of more than ¥400bn from the previous year’s profit. The rate the whole business had been priced against no longer existed.

The rebuild was structural: roughly 700 staff cut, 135 staffed branches closed, and the cost base pushed further onto the unmanned channels — the ATMs, the Mujinkun machines, the cards. The automation Acom had built for convenience in 1979 and 1993 turned out, twenty years on, to be its survival mechanism, because it was the only shape in which a lender could still earn at 18%. But refund claims did not stop. When Takefuji, the largest of the old consumer lenders, collapsed in September 2010, claims surged across the industry, and Acom had to top up its provisions again: a net loss of $2.5B (¥203bn) in the year to March 2011. Two losses on that scale is an extraordinary thing for a listed company to absorb.

The answer to the second problem was capital. In September 2008 Acom agreed to deepen the Mitsubishi alliance, and MUFG raised its holding from about 15% to 40.04% through a tender offer at ¥4,000 a share; in December 2008 Acom became a consolidated subsidiary of the group. The logic on the bank’s side was funding — in a market where the legal ceiling had been cut, the only way to keep a margin was to borrow more cheaply than an independent lender could — and MUFG designated Acom the group’s core consumer-finance company, concentrating its small unsecured loan guarantees there. DC Cash One was folded into Acom in May 2009. Notably, the listing survived: unlike the rival Promise, taken private by Sumitomo Mitsui three years later, Acom stayed on the exchange under its own name.

If lending at 18% could no longer carry the company alone, the credit judgement behind it could be sold to someone else. In September 2013 Acom set up MU Credit Guarantee, a dedicated business that underwrites the card-loan books of regional banks and credit unions — Acom’s screening expertise, earned as fee income rather than as interest spread, and far less exposed to the cycle. Acom bought in the remaining shares in December 2015, and the arithmetic has since inverted: in FY2024 the loan and credit-card business booked ¥169.4bn of revenue against the guarantee business’s ¥76.3bn, but only ¥14.0bn of profit against the guarantee business’s ¥23.6bn. The unit that guarantees other banks’ lending now earns roughly 1.7 times what the original trade does.

The refund problem took longer to die than anyone expected. The year to March 2017 brought another ¥93.3bn segment loss on the loan book, a ¥70.2bn consolidated operating loss and a ¥72.2bn net loss, almost all of it further provisioning — more than a decade after the Supreme Court ruling before claims could be called past their peak. From that same year, Acom redirected resources abroad, adding a Philippine joint venture in July 2017 and a Malaysian subsidiary in July 2021 to the Thai operation begun in 1996. In FY2024 the overseas financial business turned ¥65.4bn of revenue into ¥19.3bn of profit — a third pillar alongside the domestic loan book and the guarantees.

In April 2021 Kinoshita Masataka, the third generation of the founding family, became president. His father, Kinoshita Shigeyoshi, had held the post for twenty-one years, through the grey-zone crisis and the MUFG deal — the hardest stretch in the company’s history. The son’s stated view is that “digital is only a tool”: the automated contract machine, the card and the smartphone application are changes of medium, not of business. In 2022 Acom launched GeNiE to push into embedded finance, and as of May 2025 it had completed its 2022–24 medium-term plan with ¥2.7tn of consolidated loans outstanding and operating revenue of $2.1B (¥318bn) — back above ¥300bn for the first time in sixteen years. Cloth, pawn tickets, wages, cards, guarantees: the merchandise keeps changing form, and for ninety years the thing actually being sold has been someone’s credit.