SBI Holdings

In April 1999, SoftBank Corp. (now SoftBank Group) set up Softbank Finance Corp. as an intermediate holding company to manage finance-related business activities on behalf of SoftBank; the SBI Group regards this as its starting point.⁠[1][1]

On July 8, 1999, SOFTBANK INVESTMENT CORPORATION was founded to operate a venture capital business; it is today’s SBI Holdings. Yoshitaka Kitao has served as Representative Director, President and CEO since the company’s establishment and describes himself as the group’s founder.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In October 1999, E*TRADE SECURITIES (now SBI SECURITIES) began offering online trading services; in November, Softbank Ventures (now SBI Investment) became a wholly owned subsidiary of the company.⁠[1][1][1]

In July 2000, the company established the INTERNET TECHNOLOGY FUND with ¥150.5 billion in initial contributions, at that time the largest fund commitment of its kind in Japan.⁠[1]

In February 2002, the company was listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.⁠[1]

In July 2004, Morningstar Japan (now SBI Global Asset Management) became a subsidiary of the company.⁠[1][1]

In July 2005, SOFTBANK INVESTMENT CORPORATION changed its name to SBI Holdings, Inc. and transitioned to a holding company structure. In September of that year the company opened a representative office in Beijing, its first overseas office, and in October it established the SBI Children’s Hope Foundation to support the welfare and independence of children.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In August 2006, a SoftBank subsidiary sold its entire stake in SBI Holdings, and SBI ceased to be SoftBank Group’s financial unit.⁠[1][1][2]

In February 2007, the company established SBI Ven Capital in Singapore as a base for investment throughout Asia; in September of that year, SBI Sumishin Net Bank commenced business.⁠[1][1][1]

In January 2008, SBI Insurance commenced operations; in April, SBI Graduate School began operating; in August, SBI SECURITIES became a wholly owned subsidiary; and in November, SBI Liquidity Market, which supplies market infrastructure for FX trading, started operations.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In March 2013, South Korea’s Hyundai Swiss Savings Bank (now SBI SAVINGS BANK) became a consolidated subsidiary of the company.⁠[1]

On January 28, 2016, Ripple and SBI Holdings announced the creation of SBI Ripple Asia, which would build an engineering and sales force across Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea and ASEAN countries to sell and install RippleRippleRipple is an American fintech company, legally named Ripple Labs Inc., that provides banks, payment providers, funds, and businesses with blockchain- and digital asset-based cross-border payments, digital asset custody, a U.S. dollar stablecoin, prime brokerage, and corporate treasury management services. Its business makes extensive use of the public XRP Ledger blockchain and its native token XRP, but neither is the same as the company itself; from 2020 to 2025, the company fought a nearly five-year legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over whether its XRP sales were unregistered securities offerings.Open the full entry’s enterprise cross-border payment solutions at banks in the region; the two sides also agreed to explore listing XRP through SBI’s online brokerages. Yoshitaka Kitao said that, having surveyed the market, Ripple was the only company that had delivered battle-tested enterprise solutions and won global bank customers.⁠[3][3][3][3]

As of May 2026, the SBI Group held a stake of about 9% in Ripple; director Masashi Okuyama serves both as Representative Director and President of SBI Ripple Asia and as a member of the Board of Directors of Ripple Labs.⁠[4][1][1]

In January 2018, the company established the SBI AI & Blockchain Fund; in June, SBI VC Trade launched a crypto asset spot trading service named VCTRADE; and in September, SBI Insurance Group was listed on the Mothers Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In September 2019, the company formed a capital and business alliance with The Shimane Bank and embarked on full-scale collaboration with regional financial institutions with the goal of promoting regional revitalization.⁠[1][1]

In April 2020, the SBI Group announced a strategic capital and business alliance with the SMBC Group (Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group); in April 2021 the two jointly established Osaka Digital Exchange. As of March 31, 2026, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group held 8.4% of SBI Holdings’ shares.⁠[1][1][1][1]

On September 9, 2021, SBI Holdings, which already owned about 20% of Shinsei Bank, announced a tender offer at 2,000 yen per share, for a total of 116.4 billion yen, aiming to raise its stake to up to 48% while keeping Shinsei listed. Shinsei Bank said it had not been alerted in advance and that the offer was made without its board’s approval.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On October 21, SBI rejected new conditions requested by Shinsei Bank, including a higher price and removal of the share purchase limit, and Shinsei’s board then recommended that shareholders not tender. In December of that year, Shinsei Bank (now SBI Shinsei Bank) became a consolidated subsidiary of SBI Holdings; as a result, the group’s FY2021 profit included one-time factors such as a ¥195.6 billion gain on negative goodwill.⁠[5][5][1][1]

In April 2022, the company’s shares moved to the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange; in July of that year, crypto asset exchange operator BITPoint Japan joined the SBI Group.⁠[1][6]

In September 2023, SBI SECURITIES launched the “ZERO Revolution,” eliminating all commissions on online trading of domestic stocks for its Internet channel customers.⁠[1]

On January 12, 2024, acting on a December 15, 2023 recommendation by the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission, Japan’s Financial Services Agency took administrative actions against SBI SECURITIES under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act: from January 12 to 18 it suspended the acceptance of orders, accompanied by the company’s solicitation, to buy and sell IPO shares on their listing day; and it issued a business improvement order requiring the company to clarify where responsibility lay, including managerial responsibility, and to develop and implement a business improvement plan, to be submitted by February 13 and followed by regular progress reports.⁠[7][7][7][7]

In February 2025, Germany’s Solaris SE became a consolidated subsidiary of SBI Holdings; in March, SBI Shinsei Bank entered into the “Agreement on Definitive Repayment Scheme” for repaying public funds. That same month, all accounts and custodial assets of another Japanese crypto asset exchange operator were transferred to SBI VC Trade, increasing SBI VC Trade’s accounts to about 1.27 million and its assets under custody to about ¥400 billion.⁠[1][1][8]

In May 2025, SBI Holdings concluded a capital and business alliance with NTT, under which NTT invested about ¥110 billion in SBI Holdings for an 8.19% stake, and SBI Holdings decided to sell its entire 34.19% shareholding in SBI Sumishin Net Bank to NTT’s subsidiary NTT DOCOMO. In the same month, SBI NEO MEDIA HOLDINGS, the holding company for the group’s media business, commenced operations, and the group announced a medium-term vision targeting the fiscal year ending March 2029, its 30th anniversary.⁠[8][8][1][1]

On July 31, 2025, SBI Holdings repaid the remaining approximately ¥230 billion of public funds at SBI Shinsei Bank, ending management issues that had persisted at the bank for about a quarter of a century.⁠[8][8]

In October 2025, SBI Holdings transferred all of its shares in SBI Sumishin Net Bank in connection with the bank’s share repurchase program; the transfer produced a ¥141.6 billion gain on the sale of shares in associates in the banking-related business for FY2025.⁠[1][1]

Effective December 1, 2025, SBI Holdings carried out a 2-for-1 split of its common shares; in the same month, SBI Shinsei Bank was relisted on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.⁠[1][1]

On April 1, 2026, SBI VC Trade absorbed BITPoint Japan in a merger, with SBI VC Trade as the surviving company. In the same month, SBI Holdings completed the partial sale of SBI SAVINGS BANK shares to South Korea’s Kyobo Life Insurance; after the transfer the group holds 41.3% of the bank’s voting rights while retaining a 70% economic interest, and it acquired a partial stake in Kyobo Life, making it an equity-method affiliate.⁠[6][1][1]

SBI Holdings reported results for FY2025, ended March 31, 2026 (IFRS): revenue of ¥1,896.6 billion, up 31.4% year on year; profit before income tax expense of ¥516.7 billion, up 83.0%; profit attributable to owners of the company of ¥427.6 billion, up 163.7%; and ROE of 28.0%. The annual dividend was ¥95 per share (an interim ¥20 and a year-end ¥75, on a post-split basis).⁠[4][4][4][4]

The same results materials announced that SBI Holdings had begun considering a capital and business alliance with Bitbank; simply combining Bitbank’s approximately 960,000 accounts and approximately ¥570 billion in assets under custody as of the end of December 2025 with SBI VC Trade’s figures would give the group crypto asset deposits of about ¥1.2 trillion.⁠[4][4]

On June 24, 2026, the SBI Group began issuing JPYSC, a yen stablecoin developed jointly with Startale Group and Japan’s first trust-type (Type 3 Electronic Payment Instrument) yen stablecoin, initially offered only to SBI VC Trade account holders; the same day, SBI VC Trade began handling RLUSD, the U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by Ripple and Japan’s first Type 4 Electronic Payment Instrument. In the same month, the SBI Group signed a comprehensive agreement with U.S.-based AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry on AI transformation, describing itself as the first Japanese financial group to sign such an agreement with Anthropic.⁠[6][1][6][1]

On June 25, 2026, the SBI Holdings board resolved to make Bitbank a wholly owned subsidiary through its wholly owned subsidiary SBICAH GK, and that day concluded a basic agreement with Bitbank, its CEO Noriyuki HirosueNoriyuki HirosueNoriyuki Hirosue is an entrepreneur and the co-founder, President and CEO of Bitbank, Inc., the company that operates the Tokyo crypto asset exchange bitbank; before SBI Holdings acquired Bitbank in 2026, he was the company’s largest shareholder.Open the full entry, MIXI and CERES, and a share transfer agreement with Hirosue and other individual shareholders. The transaction was subject to clearance under the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s business combination review and to other conditions precedent.⁠[9][9][9][9]

Under the announced plan, SBICAH would first acquire for cash the Bitbank common shares held by Hirosue and other individual shareholders (53,704 shares), then subscribe for new shares issued to it by Bitbank (48,952 shares), giving it 68.76% of the voting rights; Bitbank would then use the proceeds to buy back all shares held by MIXI and CERES, leaving SBI Holdings with 100% of the voting rights indirectly. The total acquisition cost was ¥46.7 billion, including both the share purchase price and the capital increase payment; media converted this to about $289 million at the prevailing exchange rate. The announcement expected the impact on consolidated results for the fiscal year ending March 2027 to be minor.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][10][9]

SBI Holdings said that, on a simple aggregation of SBI VC Trade and Bitbank figures as of April 30, 2026, the group would have about ¥1.1 trillion in crypto assets under custody and about 2.92 million accounts after the transaction, ranking first among domestic crypto asset exchanges by assets under custody.⁠[9][9]

SBI Holdings reported results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026: revenue of ¥571.0 billion, up 28.8% year on year; profit before income tax expense of ¥225.8 billion, up 149.9%; and quarterly profit attributable to owners of the company of ¥148.1 billion, up 75.0%. It also announced an interim dividend of ¥30 per share, ¥10 more than a year earlier.⁠[6][6]

On October 1, 2026, Bitbank bought back all shares held by MIXI and CERES, completing the transaction, and Bitbank became a wholly owned subsidiary of SBI Holdings.⁠[11]

The SBI Group’s businesses are organized into five segments: Financial Services, Asset Management, PE Investment, Crypto-asset and Next Gen. The Financial Services Business uses the Internet as its main channel, with banking, securities and insurance at its core; as of March 31, 2026, SBI Shinsei Bank held ¥17.3 trillion in total deposits and SBI Insurance Group had 3.18 million in-force contracts, and the group’s securities accounts exceeded 16 million in May 2026. The group promotes a “Fourth Megabank Concept” centered on SBI Shinsei Bank and built on cooperation with regional financial institutions.⁠[1][1][1][1]

The Crypto-asset Business is carried mainly by SBI VC Trade, which runs a domestic exchange, and B2C2, a U.K. market maker (the group held 90% of B2C2 as of September 2025). The SBI Group also invested $200 million in cash in Evernorth, a U.S. company running an XRP treasury business together with Ripple and others, and is pursuing on-chain finance with Startale Group as an equity-method affiliate.⁠[1][12][4][4][1]

As of March 31, 2026, SBI Holdings had 18,669 consolidated employees and paid-in capital of ¥238,019 million, with its head office in Izumi Garden Tower in Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo. Principal shareholders included The Master Trust Bank of Japan (trust account, 14.5%), Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (8.4%) and NTT (8.4%); Yoshitaka Kitao personally held about 1.3%.⁠[1][1][1][1]

SBI Holdings: Official website: https://www.sbigroup.co.jp/english/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]