From single-product trading to maximising clients’ asset value (2024)

Changing not how it sells, but how it earns

What this shift aimed at was to change not the way of selling but the very yardstick of earning. It puts distance between the company and the practice the securities business has followed since its founding — taking a commission each time shares or bonds change hands — and resets the source of revenue on raising the value of the client’s assets. The face-to-face branch network that the Nakata management defended by going against the industry’s grain was carried over as the base of that shift. In the rhythm of a management that ran defending and changing as two separate movements, this company’s continuity and its rupture sit together.

What will be tested is how far the growth of a client’s assets and the profit of the company can be made to point in the same direction. The old model, in which the more trading you encouraged the more commission came in, always carried a structural gap between the interests of the customer and those of the broker. A shift that raises the banner of maximising asset value is also an attempt to declare those interests aligned. As the new NISA widens the base of the move “from savings to investment,” can face-to-face advice show value beyond the fee it charges? Whether the turn away from the way the firm has worked since its founding was genuine will be tested precisely in a market where the tailwind has stopped.