Perhaps it is better to lie back and let the future unfold. I suppose having the WSJ publish a story about Ryoma the Samurai and Masayoshi the Internet Visionary is not a negative like perhaps being Time Magazines Man of the Year.
Anyway, I note that Softbank was up a little in Tokyo and Bloomberg had more banking stuff. I'm not clear on who are partners and who are going to be competitors in the long run, but there seems to be a lot of scrambling going on:
Japan's Suruga Bank to Start Net Alliances With Sony, Others
By Bradley Meacham
Tokyo, June 14 (Bloomberg) -- Suruga Bank Ltd., a Japanese regional bank, said it will start alliances with Sony Corp. and other companies to expand its customer base nationwide.
Suruga plans to offer new loan products on Sony's ``So-net'' homepage in early July, said Mitsuyoshi Okano, bank president. The bank also plans to expand ties with Gulliver International Co. Ltd., a Japanese used car retailer, and others to offer new loan products and position itself ahead of nationwide banks eyeing similar operations, he said.
The alliances are the latest in a string of Suruga ventures which analysts say sets the lender apart from its competition.
``This just isn't the speed of traditional banks,'' said Koya Hasegawa, an analyst at UBS Warburg LLC. ``Management's moving continually faster.''
Details on the new alliances are still being worked out, so sales goals aren't yet available, a bank spokesman said.
Both alliances follow Suruga's venture with Softbank Corp., the country's top Internet investment company, to set up an online bank branch to lure customers across Japan with perks such as free automated teller machine withdrawals and interest rates twice those offered by other banks. The branch, set up in April, receives about 100 applications per day, more than Japanese online brokerages, Okano said.
Suruga, based in Shizuoka Prefecture, south of Tokyo, has wowed investors by using database credit screening that's novel in Japan and by thoroughly explaining its business focus on retail customers. The lender's shares, up more than 200 percent since it began wooing investors last year, closed down 25 yen, or 1.35 percent, Tuesday at 1,825 yen.
Speaking at an investor conference, Okano said the bank aims to sell an average of 10 financial products to the majority of its customers by March 2001. Suruga plans to have issued 500,000 credit cards in the period, up from 370,000 as of last month.
The bank also plans to expand online accounts to 100,000 by 2002 and 300,000 in 2003. The bank has about 16,000 accounts now, slightly below the average for nationwide banks.
``We have to keep ahead of the competition with new products and channels,'' Okano said of the bank's plan to sell more kinds of financial products to individuals. ``There will come a day when we're no longer considered a bank.''
Loans to individuals should account for more than 50 percent of the bank's portfolio in the next year, up from 46 percent in March. That's more than the 28 percent for the next highest regional bank and at least triple the rate for major banks, Okano said. The loans, including high-margin mortgages sought by Japanese banks that are traditionally strapped with low-interest corporate loans, pushed the bank's deposit margin to 1.24 percent in March.
To be sure, competition is likely to heat up as nationwide banks enter similar business. Suruga needs to follow a niche strategy to avoid competing head-on against bigger lenders or companies outside banking, analysts say.
``They have to do things that the big banks won't do or can't do,'' Hasegawa said. ``It comes down to ideas and how fast you implement them.''
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