Company history

In June 1954 three men from Hakodate — Ibe Masajiro and two partners — set up Department Store Credit Sales with capital of $9,167 (¥3m), copying into Hokkaido a business model already working in Tokyo: the coupon-book instalment scheme of Nippon Shinpan, the national leader. They had neither credit records nor a merchant network, so they borrowed both: the city’s leading department store, Bonimoriya, became their first affiliated merchant, and a former executive of the Hakodate dockyard was brought onto the board to lend the venture standing among local businessmen.

What followed was a deliberate refusal to meet the leader head-on. A Sendai branch opened in 1957; in 1959 the company dropped “Department Store” from its name and became Kita-Nihon Credit Sales, because the Department Store Law of the day made it necessary to recruit merchants outside the department stores themselves. In 1965 a tie-up with a large book distributor added individual-item instalment credit — financing one purchase at a time rather than a coupon book — a second technique that did not compete with the first. For a late entrant with no credit data, choosing ground the big firms had not claimed was less a strategy than a condition of survival.

The clearest case came in 1969, when Kita-Nihon took capital from Sony Shoji, Sony’s sales arm, and began financing colour televisions on instalments — securing a fixed share of a manufacturer’s sales-finance business at a time when Toyota and Nissan kept such work inside captive lenders of their own. The fragility beneath it showed a year later: a funding error by a bank-seconded director left roughly $2.5M (¥900m) of notes unpayable, and only a three-month deferral granted by Sony kept the company out of bankruptcy. Listing on the Sapporo Stock Exchange followed in 1973, and in 1974 an auto-loan business built expressly around imported and used cars — precisely the vehicles the carmakers’ own finance companies declined.

The head-office functions moved from Hakodate to Tokyo in 1975, and in April 1976 a merger produced a new name: Jaccs, for Japan Consumer Credit Service. The change from “Kita-Nihon” — North Japan — was the point. That September the founder, Ibe, stepped down through illness and Kawamura Tomozo, seconded from Mitsubishi Bank, took the presidency: the shift from provincial venture to national credit company and the shift from founder rule to banker rule arrived in the same year. Listing moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange second section in November 1976 and the first section in September 1978, with Sony Shoji appearing as the largest shareholder at 9.3%.

By 1980 Jaccs had slipped from second to fourth in the industry by sales, and its management declined to chase the number back. It bought scale instead where the books were clean, absorbing Pioneer Credit — the finance subsidiary of the audio maker — in October 1980 and taking with it the instalment business in expensive audio equipment. That the acquired company was financially sound was read in the industry as the signature of the acquirer: a firm that preferred a strong balance sheet to a better ranking.

In April 1989 Yamane Kaname, one of the three founders, became president, and the same month Jaccs began issuing MasterCard- and Visa-branded cards, moving its settlement business onto international networks. That July, marking thirty-five years, it gave its old Hakodate head-office building — designated under the city’s historic-landscape ordinance — to the municipality and moved the registered head office within Hakodate. The centre of gravity was in Tokyo; the registered address stayed north.

While Nippon Shinpan and Orico poured bubble-era money into property, Jaccs did not — the single exception being the Ebisu site in Tokyo it bought in 1994 for its own head-office building. After the bubble burst, the industry’s profits came to rest on revolving-credit interest charged in the grey zone: above the 18% ceiling of the Interest Rate Restriction Act, below the 40.004% ceiling of the Capital Subscription Law. In February 1997 Jaccs cut its revolving rate from 24.36% to 18%, and in February 1998 to 16.8% — under the statutory ceiling, the lowest in the industry, and described at the time as breaking a wall the industry had treated as its floor.

The cut was expected to cost about ¥3.5 billion of revenue in the year to March 1998, and Jaccs absorbed it by shifting part of some ¥860 billion of interest-bearing debt into cheaper commercial paper — a manoeuvre available only because the money had not gone into land. The reasoning was defensive: deregulation was about to let bank-issued cards offer instalment payment, which would destroy the one thing a credit company’s card could do that a bank’s could not, leaving only price. Nippon Shinpan and Orico, spending their cash on property write-offs, could not follow. The difference in balance sheets set the difference in pricing, and the difference in pricing decided the next decade.

The reckoning came with the revised Money Lending Business Act of December 2006, which abolished the grey zone and made past interest refundable. Nippon Shinpan was absorbed into Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos and had its individual-item instalment business carved out; Orico turned to a megabank for support. Jaccs, having cut a decade early, took a limited hit — an ordinary loss of ¥8.4 billion and a net loss of ¥9.8 billion in the year to March 2008, back to ¥6.3 billion of ordinary profit a year later. In March 2008 Mitsubishi UFJ took a 20% stake through a third-party allotment, and in April Jaccs bought the vehicle holding Nippon Shinpan’s carved-out instalment business — inheriting the customer base of the company it had been founded to imitate.

Having wound up its overseas subsidiaries in 2005–06, Jaccs went abroad again in June 2010 with a finance company in Vietnam built around motorcycle loans — the same logic as 1974, applied to a new middle class buying its first durable goods. Indonesia followed: a 40% stake in 2012, a merger into PT Mitra Pinasthika Mustika Finance in 2014, full consolidation in 2017. A joint venture in the Philippines came in 2016 and a Cambodian company in 2017, completing a four-country ASEAN network. A domestic firm of some 2,700 people became a group of roughly 6,000.

At home the group kept taking on work others were shedding: in September 2019 it absorbed JCB’s credit-guarantee business, becoming the point at which guarantee functions inside the Mitsubishi UFJ orbit were consolidated. Group operating revenue rose from ¥145.8 billion in the year to March 2019 to ¥191.0 billion in the year to March 2025, and ordinary profit from ¥14.4 billion to ¥25.8 billion, with a record ¥31.8 billion in between as the pandemic drove up used-car prices. The overseas business grew revenue from ¥10.8 billion to ¥25.7 billion over the same span but posted segment losses on rising credit costs — the unfinished part of the plan.

In March 2025 Mitsubishi UFJ announced an additional investment of about $267.3M (¥40bn), lifting its holding from roughly 20% to roughly 40%, and Jaccs published a three-year plan, Do next!, built around growth through the MUFG relationship and acquisitions, a shift “from volume to quality,” and explicit capital-efficiency targets — ¥204.5 billion of operating revenue and ¥31.0 billion of ordinary profit by the year to March 2028. Murakami Ryo, president since 2022 and a career-long builder of the imported-car loan business, has made auto finance the pillar. Seventy years after three men in Hakodate financed department-store purchases, the instrument has changed many times over; the preference for solvency over scale has not.