From DX Stock Selection to DX Grand Prix Winner SMBC Group’s playbook for AI transformation

2026 DX Stocks shift focus from DX to AX

Opening the ceremony, State Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Kenji Yamada identified AI transformation (AX) as the defining theme of this year’s DX Stocks.

“Going forward, AI must be seen not simply as a tool for improving operational efficiency, but as the driver for transforming business processes, organizations, and corporate culture. This AX perspective will become increasingly important as companies seek to fundamentally reinvent themselves so as to enhance their competitiveness.”

What all the companies selected as 2026 DX Stocks shared was their view of AI not merely as a tool for improving efficiency, but as the starting point for corporate transformation. They talked about building the data infrastructure underpinning AI use and creating new value through collaboration across organizational boundaries.

SMBC Group places AI at the heart of its business strategy with one trillion yen in IT investment over three years

SMBC Group, for example, has made it clear that AI sits at the heart of its business strategy. Speaking at the ceremony, President and Group CEO of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Toru Nakashima outlined SMBC Group’s new Medium-Term Management Plan, unveiled in April.

“We set the clear goal of becoming Japan’s leading financial institution over the medium to long term while also establishing a stronger global presence.”

At the core of the plan is a commitment to “aim higher through bold transformation.” Mr. Nakashima identified AI and other technologies as the key to achieving that vision.

“To equip ourselves to compete on an equal footing with top European and US banks, we will engage in an intensive process of IT transformation across the Group, positioning AI and other technologies as a major management priority.”

The scale of the Group’s investment reflects that ambition.

“Over the next three years, SMBC Group plans to invest one trillion yen in IT. That’s a huge increase on the total investment of around 800 billion over the previous three-year period and around 530 billion in the three years before that. We also plan to nearly triple the number of specialists with expertise in AI and cloud technologies, bring more systems development in-house, and step up the pace of development still further.”

SMBC Group will leverage that expanded IT investment to grow its AI and cloud talent pool and enhance its in-house development capabilities to set itself on a solid trajectory for further growth.

Olive, Trunk, and SMBC Connect: A digital strategy that reimagines customer engagement

A defining feature of SMBC Group’s digital strategy is that it extends beyond boosting operational efficiency to fundamentally redesign customer engagement.

Olive—the Group’s integrated financial service for retail customers—is envisaged as a platform for digitalizing the Group’s entire retail business. Over time, various services will be consolidated on the Olive platform, elevating the customer experience.

One example is Olive Consulting, which brings a 24/7 AI chatbot into asset management services to reshape what has traditionally been a human-fronted business into a new digital service model.

For corporate customers, the Group will roll out Trunk, originally launched in 2025, as a digital platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition to providing one-stop access to banking, payments, financing, and DX support, the plan is to also enhance Trunk’s factoring and digital accounting capabilities.

SMBC will support SME business process reengineering (BPR) by enabling these businesses to access all the services they need to manage their operations through a single online platform.

In April 2026, the Group also launched SMBC Connect, a new global transaction business brand with a service offering including a “CFO agent” that supports decision-making through financial performance visualization, as well as an “AI process builder” that uses AI to identify process bottlenecks and helps organizations digitize their operations. The idea is to go beyond providing financial services to support customers’ corporate transformation.

All these initiatives illustrate how SMBC Group aims to not simply digitize financial services but rather transform its customers' behavior and operations.

“They gave me a 50 billion yen budget”: How SMBC Group is driving AX

During a panel discussion at the ceremony, Group CDIO and Senior Managing Corporate Executive Officer of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Akio Isowa looked back on the Group’s AI journey.

“Our efforts have unfolded in three distinct phases.”

The first began in 2023, when SMBC Group gave generative AI access to all its employees in Japan. But a year later, an analysis of usage patterns revealed that most employees were only using the technology for personal tasks like translation and replying to emails.

Underwhelmed with this limited exploitation of the potential of AI, Mr. Isowa launched a second phase in 2024, armed with a dedicated budget to accelerate AI adoption.

“They gave me 50 billion yen to work with,” he recalled.

SMBC Group allocated 50 billion yen over five years directly to the Group CDIO, enabling him to action AI initiatives with minimal delay.

The lightning-fast decision-making is particularly striking. A mechanism was established whereby investment decisions (development and staffing costs included) could be made on the spot at small-scale meetings limited to Group CEO Nakashima and the relevant senior executives. The impact on the ground was immediate. Business units began competing to propose new AI initiatives, with a whole string of new projects launched.

In the third phase, SMBC Group has established a cross-functional team of around 200 personnel to integrate these scattered projects, as well as bringing some team members across into a dedicated AI Transformation Department tasked with coordinating AX across the Group.

Mr. Isowa’s account underscored an important point: successful AI adoption is not simply a technology challenge—it also depends on organizational design and budget allocation.

Another fascinating anecdote that Mr. Isowa shared at the ceremony concerned the impact of AI uptake on cloud migration. Like many financial institutions, SMBC Group had historically relied heavily on on-premises systems, reflecting the industry’s emphasis on safety and stability.

But when the Group went to integrate AI into business processes, the way in which data was fragmented across different business units posed a major obstacle.

“The more we used AI, the more obvious it became that disconnected data was holding us back.”

As a result, discussions at the executive level increasingly focused on more specific and more technical questions, including how to connect and integrate the cloud services and data and AI platforms being used in isolation by the various business units.

The way in which promoting AI uptake lent added momentum to IT infrastructure reform was another illustration of AI’s role as a catalyst for corporate transformation.

Trunk tackles the “most core of core banking operations”

What was the evaluation committee’s perception of these SMBC Group initiatives?

During the panel discussion by the committee members in the second part of the ceremony, Development of Digital Human Resources President Hitoshi Tsunoda singled out Trunk, the Group’s digital platform for SMEs, as particularly compelling.

Many organizations pursuing DX start with lower-risk, peripheral areas slightly removed from the core business and its mission-critical systems. But not Trunk, Tsunoda said.

While its clientele might be SMEs, Trunk ventures into the very mission-critical territory of opening corporate accounts, with SMBC Group creating a “truly outstanding mechanism” for this “most core of core banking operations.” As someone involved in SME support himself, Tsunoda suggested that SMEs would welcome Trunk with open arms.

Tsunoda also highlighted SMBC Group’s data management. While many Japanese companies give lip service to the importance of this, “ask a company how many people it allocates to data management, and very few can answer,” he observed. SMBC Group, by contrast, was a real frontrunner, not only establishing a data management department nearly a decade ago but also subsequently systematically clarifying roles and responsibilities for data management right across the Group.

“Our competitive edge is the trust of our customers and society”

As seen above, SMBC Group is positioning AI and other technologies at the heart of its management strategy, using them to transform not only the Group’s operations and organization but even its customer engagement.

In closing his speech, however, Mr. Nakashima emphasized that for financial institutions, trust must remain an absolute priority.

“No matter how much technologies evolve, the wellspring of our competitiveness will always be the trust placed in us by our customers and by society.”

That, in essence, is what DX means for SMBC Group—by incorporating technological advances, we provide better services and thereby live up to the trust placed in us by our customers and society.