“It will be the first and last project of this kind in the world,” says Mitsuyoshi Okano, president of Suruga Bank, a medium-sized regional bank outside Tokyo that is famous for its innovative retail lending, including the first housing loans ever offered in Japan’s male-dominated business world to single working women.
The project that Mr Okano (whose slogan as president of Suruga in the past 23 years has been “first entries for ever”) is talking about is not a new loan product pioneered by his own bank, however, but Yucho Bank (aka Japan Post Bank), the unwieldy behemoth that emerged on October 1 last year as one of the four privatised successors to the state-owned postal system. Yucho’s assets include 24,000 post offices, 20% of the outstanding issue of Japanese government bonds (JGBs) and ¥180,000bn ($1,800bn) worth of customer deposits. That last figure is 80% ahead of that at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, which was Japan’s largest bank before Yucho debuted last autumn.
