“Japan Is Awakening” Japan Fintech Festival Links Japan and the World through Fintech

Every year, Singapore hosts the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF). Now one of the world’s biggest fintech festivals, it was launched in 2016 with government support as a Strategic National Project initiative designed to establish Singapore as the fintech hub of Asia.

The SFF has gone from strength to strength, growing into a massive fintech event that last year attracted more than 66,000 participants from around the world. That runaway success prompted the Monetary Authority of Singapore to set up the not-for-profit organization Elevandi as an independent legal entity in 2021 with the aim of further developing the international fintech community.

The SFF has helped Singapore’s fintech industry to achieve spectacular growth. Singapore now has more than 1,000 fintech firms, and investment in the fintech sector has increased 200 times in the last eight years.

Japan has less than half as many fintech companies, and fintech investment too is slow. The inaugural JFF was held in 2023 to help evolve Japan’s fintech industry and boost Japan’s influence across Asia and in global markets. Elevandi Japan was established in August 2023 to handle the ongoing operation of the event.

As Elevandi Japan’s ultimate goal is to initiate a major fintech movement from Japan and reform the finance industry, the JFF program is designed so as to provide a place for different stakeholders—startups, financial institutions, and relevant authorities like the FSA, the Bank of Japan, the Digital Agency, and other countries’ central banks—to get together and network beyond the bounds of organizations and roles through discussion, business-matching, and other events. The 2024 JFF attracted 2,300 participants, 44 percent of whom came from overseas.

All the sessions were so good that it’s hard to choose just one! But I was particularly impressed with the session “Building & sustaining unicorns: Challenges, rewards and lessons” with Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO of the Indian digital payment firm Paytm. Sharma drew on his own experience to describe how a startup founder approaches the process from the launch through to the company achieving unicorn status.

The session on the untapped potential of women entrepreneurs in Japan was also fascinating. I learned a lot about what needs to be done in Japan to promote women’s engagement, and I thought that it would be good if the JFF were to bring actively engaged women even further into the spotlight.

My attention was also caught by the keynote address by SMBC Group Chief Digital Innovation Officer Akio Isowa, entitled “What matters most in 2024 in Japan/ASEAN?” For better or for worse, Japan’s financial market has always seemed rather solid and traditional, but it was very clear from the CDIO’s presentation that change is now afoot.

Thank you for mentioning that speech. I was there listening to it too, and I thought it really got across the current situation in Japan, which foreign participants probably weren’t fully aware of.

As Pieter said, Japan is widely seen as a country resistant to change, and in fact I think that until recently that image was quite accurate. Now, however, a major transformation is underway. In his speech, Mr. Isowa highlighted changes in the culture of big companies, such as the SMBC Group’s introduction of an intrapreneur system and relaxation of its dress code. He also provided concrete examples of the changes he’s noticing in his daily interactions with startup entrepreneurs, such as the influx of dazzlingly skilled talent into the startup space. In particular, he highlighted the way in which many recent startups are “born global”—in other words, with their eyes on the international market from the start—as a big departure from the past.

Watching overseas participants crowd around Mr. Isowa afterwards, I felt like I was experiencing Japan’s second opening!

The SMBC Group has been sponsoring the SFF through our Singapore operation since the inaugural SFF in 2016. Asia is a market of huge strategic importance to us, and Singapore lies at the heart of that market. The aim was to make our presence felt at one of the world’s largest fintech events so as to lay the foundations for growing our business in Asia and globally as well. I’ve actually participated in the SFF myself the last two years.

Given that history, when we heard about the inaugural JFF in 2023, we immediately told Mr. Kito and Pieter to count us in. In addition to wanting to help promote interaction between Japan and other countries and create the seeds of innovation, we felt that raising Japan’s value in the fintech space was something that the SMBC Group should tackle.

Rising FinTech was primarily a networking event connecting companies around the world with Japanese financial institutions and companies. We designed it with the aim of enabling foreign entrepreneurs to speak directly with Japanese businesspeople and creating opportunities for business matching and investment.

Just as we hoped, the event drew entrepreneurs from many countries, and the venue was abuzz with communication.

We were thrilled to have been able to help create a space for fintech professionals from around the world to come along to exchange ideas and network. A lot of what is happening in countries like India and the Philippines that are right in the midst of their growth stage far surpasses the current level in Japan, and we have much to learn. Going ahead, I think we will also see business opportunities arise with companies that participated in the event.

Coincidentally, the ascending curve in the SMBC Group logo is called the Rising Mark, with the word rising also symbolizing our Group. In the sense of growing the Japanese and fintech ecosystems and growing the Group as well, I feel that we have been able to work with the Elevandi team with one mind at a very deep level.

“Rise Together” has been our stated vision since we held that first JFF in 2023. When the Nikkei average finally hit a record high this year, it came after a long recession bemoaned in Japan as the “lost 30 years.” Having lived through that time, I really want to break Japan free of that pervasive stagnation and help it make a comeback on the world stage. Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun. I would love for the JFF to open the way for the power of community to set the country back on a growth trajectory and help Japan rise.

Next year, we will hold the JFF on an even bigger scale. To grow the Japanese economy, we too need to keep the JFF growing as a platform. Just as the SFF has scaled up from year to year, in Japan too, we plan to grow the JFF into a massive event.

We’re also looking at adding sessions on cutting-edge technologies like deep tech, cloud computing, and AI. The finance space uses a lot of technologies behind the scenes, and Japan has no shortage of companies engaged in new technology development. We want to foreground those.

Also, while the 2024 JFF really increased international awareness of Japan, there are still many areas that remain opaque to the overseas eye. To shine a light on those areas, we’re considering organizing activities like field tours to offer a first-hand look.

It would be great if we could increase cooperation with geographically close countries like South Korea and Taiwan. We also want to come up with ways to involve students and other members of the younger generation.

The SMBC Group wants to continue contributing to the event in some form. With initiatives like Rising FinTech, you can’t expect concrete returns right out of the gate. It will take time to nurture the connections with other countries required to grow Japan’s ecosystems.

Over the long term, though, I believe that there will be major returns. The combination of financial institutions like us with fintech companies could well create new business, and we could well find partners with whom to set up new businesses. We could also invest in startups that we have connected with. The SMBC Asia Rising Fund, the corporate venture capital fund that we set up last year, was established with exactly that kind of investment and collaboration in mind.

In any case, we want to maintain a broad outlook and keep working with movements like the JFF and SFF from a long-term perspective so as to contribute to the development of the Japanese, Asian, and global economies. We would also like other Japanese corporate majors to come on board. That would really help to take the movement to the next level.

In his JFF address, Mr. Isowa used the expression “Japan is awakening.” In other words, after its “lost 30 years,” Japan is finally beginning to wake, and we at the SMBC Group want to continue doing our bit to ensure that it doesn’t slide back into sleep.