YOSHITAKA KITAO

Kitao started at Nomura Securities, basically Japan's Wall Street. He was good at it.

Good enough to get sent to London as a Managing Director at Wasserstein Perella, a hard-charging American deal shop. Then in 1995 Masayoshi Son came calling.

Son made him Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of SoftBank. That is the job that changed everything.

In 1999 Kitao founded a new arm called SoftBank Investment, or SBI, to build internet finance. By 2005 SBI had grown up and split off from SoftBank.

Kitao renamed it Strategic Business Innovator and kept the same three letters. He has run it ever since.

SBI Holdings is the mothership. Underneath it sits SBI Securities, the largest online stock brokerage in Japan by account numbers.

There is SBI Sumishin Net Bank, a huge online-only bank. There is an asset management arm and an insurance arm.

Kitao also went hard into crypto early. SBI runs its own digital asset exchange and partnered closely with Ripple to push blockchain payments across Asia.

More recently he started buying stakes in Japan's struggling regional banks. The plan is to knit dozens of small local lenders into one modern network.

It is an empire built one financial license at a time.

Kitao thinks in decades and ecosystems, not single stocks. His big idea is what he calls a business ecosystem.

Instead of one product, he builds a web of financial services that feed each other. A customer opens a brokerage account.

Then they use the bank. Then the insurance.

Then the robo-advisor. Each piece makes the others stronger.

He also moves early on new technology. He was into online trading before most of Japan, then crypto, then blockchain, now AI.

So what does that mean in practice? He would rather plant a hundred seeds and water the ones that grow than bet the farm on one crop.

The whole company is the win. Kitao started SBI in 1999 with a mandate to build internet finance for SoftBank.

Today SBI Holdings is one of Japan's largest financial groups, with SBI Securities sitting on top of the online brokerage market. He took a startup idea inside SoftBank and turned it into a business handling millions of accounts.

The crypto bet deserves its own mention. He moved SBI into digital assets and Ripple early, while most Japanese banks called the whole thing a scam.

That head start gave SBI real ground in Asian blockchain finance.

Kitao's regional bank plan is his riskiest and messiest bet. Starting around 2019 he began buying stakes in Japan's small local banks, promising to build them into a fourth megabank group.

The problem is these banks are shrinking. Japan's countryside is aging and emptying out.

Fixing dozens of sleepy lenders is slow, expensive work with no guaranteed payoff. Critics say he is collecting problems, not assets.

The jury is still out on whether the grand alliance ever pays for itself.

Kitao's core belief is four words. Morality and economy are one.

He borrowed it from Confucius and the Analects, which he has read since childhood. His argument is that a company chasing only profit will eventually cut corners and blow up.

A company grounded in doing right earns lasting trust, and trust is what finance runs on. He preaches three virtues.

Faith, righteousness, and benevolence. It sounds soft for a hard-nosed banker.

But he has run SBI on it for over 20 years and the numbers held up.

Kitao's love of Chinese classics did not come from business school. It came from home.

He grew up around his grandfather and father, who steeped him in the Analects from a young age. That upbringing shaped how he thinks about money and duty.

He keeps his personal life private, which is normal for Japanese executives. What the public sees is the work and the writing.

The man quotes Confucius in earnings-season interviews and nobody blinks anymore.

Kitao studied economics at Keio University, one of Japan's top private schools. He then went abroad to the University of Cambridge in England.

That mix matters. Keio gave him the Japanese establishment network.

Cambridge and later London gave him the Western finance skills he used at Wasserstein Perella and SoftBank. Not many Japanese executives of his generation had both.

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