SMBC Group and Atrae Join Forces on SMBC Wevox (Part 1):Boosting Organizational Capabilities and Corporate Value

It goes back to 2019, when I was looking at how to boost employee engagement and motivation as a way of taking the SMBC Group to the next level. Partly I simply wanted to contribute to the Group and to my colleagues, but I was also in my early 30s and feeling strangely desperate to make a change in the world and make something of myself.

I went along to outside events in search of ideas, and I met Mr. Kawamoto from Atrae at one of them. Listening to his presentation on boosting organizational capabilities, I remember how thrilled I was to realize that here was someone even younger than me who was clearly passionately focused on the organization as an entity. That sense of a kindred spirit deepened when we spoke at the get-together afterwards.

I remember feeling strongly that I wanted to get our services out more to people like him. As a platform for improving organizational capabilities, Atrae’s Wevox is designed to foster workplaces that inspire energy and passion. I really wanted to get Wevox out there more to people like Mr. Sugimoto who are always working for the good of the organization.

At that stage, we knew we wanted to do something together, but we hadn’t got as far as a joint venture.

The big shakeup came at the end of 2022, three years after we met. I was on secondment to an outside company but due to go back to SMBC in early 2023. Thinking seriously about what I should do when I got back, I knew that I wanted to become someone who could make the organization better—the same ambition that I’d nursed since I first went out into the job market.

I immediately said that I was in. According to the State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report, only five percent of Japanese workers feel motivated and engaged at work, which ranks Japan as the lowest of the countries surveyed. And while the global average is rising, in Japan it’s falling. While this may be partly due to different perceptions of work, from a macro perspective, it’s clear that the workplace environment in Japan is less than ideal for its workers.

When I poured my heart out to Mr. Kawamoto, I still didn’t know what department I would be placed in or what work I would be doing when I went back to SMBC. But I was so set on my idea that I contacted Akio Isowa, who is now the Group’s chief digital innovation officer (CDIO), and explained what I wanted to do. He said that the idea had potential and told me to give it some more thought. When I went back to SMBC in early February, they put me in the Digital Strategy Department, which pursues new business.

A couple of months later, I decided to submit my plan for discussion at the CDIO meeting where they decide whether to invest in new digital businesses, so I made preparations at lightning speed. I gave my presentation at the April CDIO meeting as scheduled, and everyone including Group CEO Jun Ohta agreed that there was no reason not to give it a go and told me to push ahead quickly. And so by July, we were issuing a press release announcing that a basic agreement had been reached.

Because I was convinced that the market was waiting for the services we would create.

I had right in front of me customers and colleagues who were taking on the challenge of improving their organizations, and there were also so many people who were highly motivated but weren’t able to achieve the results they wanted. So the stage was set, and I just had to hurry up and get started.

Mr. Kawamoto had the same mindset, so we both put everything out on the table—the good, the bad, and the ugly, including the potential losses and gains for both companies—and made the necessary adjustments in the shortest possible time.

I often talked to Hideki Mishima, the CEO of an SMBC Group digital subsidiary called SMBC CLOUDSIGN, about why he wanted to become an intrapreneur within a bank. Banks in fact provide a great foundation for a business in that they have all those professionals across different departments delivering brilliant solutions to numerous business leaders. That was exactly why I had been thinking since around 2019 that I wanted to provide society with new value in some form using the SMBC Group as my foundation. The Group’s policy of proactively elevating young employees into CEO positions was another motivating factor.

Not really, no. When I first went to Mr. Kawamoto, I talked about making Japan a country to be proud of, and that became our vision. We were really already aligned on that vision from the start. We did sit down together to see if we could come up with something better, but we both agreed that we’d got it right the first time, so that’s what we went with.

Because the SMBC Group and Atrae operate in different areas, there are obviously some cultural differences, but we absolutely shared the feeling of wanting to be proud of having been born in Japan and to make Japan a better place, and I think that’s why we were able to agree so readily on a vision.

I think that sharing the same basic thinking opened the way for a conversation not between the SMBC Group and Atrae but between two like-minded individuals that could have been from the same organization. As you would expect when two completely different companies set up a business together, there were certain details that required discussion, but every time there was a clash, rather than choosing between A or B, we kept inventing new “ultra-C” options that would deliver 110 percent. And that’s how we were able to move so quickly.

A lot of people—myself included—want to help make customers and society better, make their company better, and so on. I want to visualize that passion and the passion of people who want to start something new and provide as much affirmation as I can. The new company will target all individuals and organizations taking up a challenge at their own initiative, regardless of the scale.

Organizations take various forms. Some are pyramids, for example, while others pursue amoeba management. Whatever the form, a good organization is one whose members can boast about. I want to start by creating lots of organizations that can be boasted about, then extend that out to teams, groups, companies, and industries, and, ultimately, fill Japan and the world with good organizations.

Companies are made up of a business component and an organizational component. This is what makes it meaningful for SMBC, a bank, to address organization-building. And if we can visualize corporate engagement—employees’ commitment and passion, etc.—to show how those figures impact sales, we may even be able to create new rules for capitalism. Our aim is to integrate and elevate both business and organizational capabilities so as to create a new standard in corporate value creation, and I think this is something that the combined strengths of organizational wunderkind Atrae and the SMBC Group as a financial giant make us uniquely well-positioned to achieve. I’m looking forward to fusing our passion and resources to realize a worldview that enables everyone to feel engaged in their work, in turn boosting corporate value.