Company history

The listed Okasan spent the 1980s hiving off its peripheral functions into subsidiaries — information services in 1980, the research department as Okasan Economic Research Institute in 1981, asset management in 1984, back-office work in 1996, with a Hong Kong arm from 1976. The pattern of holding each function in its own legal entity would become the blueprint for the holding company two decades later. What did not change was the earning engine. So long as the whole market rose, a broker could recommend a spread of names, lose money on one and still show the client a gain; the skill of any individual pick never had to be tested. Okasan’s revenue stayed where it had been at listing — mostly commissions from retail clients.

When prices turned, the distortion surfaced as loss compensation and hard selling. Okasan’s compensation payments came to about ¥500 million, trivial beside the tens of billions at the largest houses, but the trouble kept coming: in March 1993 a serving managing director was summoned before an Upper House budget committee over the tax-evasion case of former LDP vice-president Shin Kanemaru, and that May a former branch sales manager who had lost client money disappeared. Revenue for the year to March 1993 fell 32.3% to $324.7M (¥36bn), and the ordinary loss reached $165.5M (¥18bn) — a third straight year of falling sales and profits.

With every reason to cut heads, Okasan instead extended new-hire training from two weeks to a full year — the longest in Japanese finance, against two months at Nomura and about four at Daiwa — pulling seventy-one graduates off the floor for twelve months. Managing director Kato Tetsuo, who pushed the plan through a hostile board, became president in 1997 when Kato Seiichi moved up to chairman and, from 1998, to the chairmanship of the Japan Securities Dealers Association. Asked in 1999 to describe his own firm, Kato Seiichi called it “one corner of the second tier,” and admitted that the retail, region-focused positioning Okasan had flown for a decade was by then “no longer much of a distinction.” In October 1999 brokerage commissions were fully deregulated, and the structure that had supplied seven-tenths of revenue ceased to be a given.

In October 2003 Okasan Securities split its operating business into a new company and turned itself into a pure holding company, Okasan Holdings — renamed Okasan Securities Group in 2008. Under that structure it became a consolidator of Japan’s shrinking regional brokers, taking in Sanko Securities, San-en Securities, Marufuku (renamed Okasan Niigata Securities) and, in 2021, Securities Japan. Unlike the 1950s, it no longer swallowed these firms whole; it held them as subsidiaries. In 2008 it also ran the logic backwards, folding the research institute it had spun out in 1981 back into the broker.

The commission-free era demanded a different answer. Around 2000 an online broker with roughly 160 staff was earning much the same ordinary profit as a second-tier house with 1,200 — a discrepancy no full-service firm could out-price. In January 2006 the group set up Okasan Online Securities as a separate company, keeping the cheap channel legally apart from the branch network. Sixteen years later, in January 2022, Okasan Securities absorbed it: the price advantage had never arrived, and only the duplicated systems and overheads remained. In 2014 Shinshiba Hiroyuki had become president, ending fifty-three years of Kato-family leadership.

What the group is building now is less a brokerage than a supplier to other brokerages. It calls the idea a securities platform: providing trading, custody and product infrastructure to affiliated brokers, independent financial advisers and regional banks. Okasan BANK, launched in September 2024 on another institution’s banking licence, gathered more than ¥70 billion in deposits, of which some 92% stayed inside the group at maturity. In 2026 Okasan agreed to hand part of the online business to SBI Securities and to merge Securities Japan with its technology arm into a platform-only broker. Client assets reached ¥10.1 trillion across 1.1 million accounts at March 2026, and net profit hit a record — yet the goal management states is still the old one: shift the weight from transaction fees to recurring, asset-based revenue, and finally undo the 71.1% of 1973.