The 10 fintech companies in Japan you need to know

This is the final post in a two-part feature on fintech in Japan. You can read an overview of Japan’s shift to fintech here.

With changing regulations, increasing investments, and megabank support, fintech is ready to explode in Japan.

The country has a ton of personal assets, 52 percent of which are held in cold, hard, cash. Japan’s piggy banks are due for an upgrade in the smartphone era. Here are some of the tech companies posed to do it.

Katsuaki Sato, founder and CEO of Metaps

Katsuaki wants to change the very notion of money. “I want to do everything that current financial institutions do,” he says, believing that banks as they are now will not exist in the future.

Metaps is the only publicaly traded company on our list. It was previously Japan’s most funded startup before going public in 2015 with an initial market capitalization of over US$350 million.

Spike is Metaps’ new online payment service. Merchants can process up to US$10,000 of payments per month for free with its basic plan or for a little more than US$25 per month process unlimited payments for a 2.55 percent fee plus US$0.30 per transaction.

Katsuaki believes the current business model of payments is obsolete. “The margin for payments is so small it’s hard to make a business surrounding it,” he says. Katsuaki sees a day when sending money is as easy as sending a text and believes that like spending cash, payments should be free of charge.

Katsuaki says he wants to apply his experience in app monetization to the payments world. “The most important thing is a database and the flow of money,” he says. For example if one of the merchants using Spike is growing quickly based on processed sales, Metaps could offer the company some of its other services like advertisements.

Katsuaki believes that one day all companies will do financial services internally and issue virtual currencies and rewards points to customers. He sees a future where “internet companies and countries will be rivals [in issuing currencies], and the users will decide who wins.”

Takako Kansai, founder and CEO of Zaim

Yoshi Yokokawa, founder and CEO of AlpacaDB

Daisuke Sasaki, founder and CEO of Freee

Nao Kitazawa, COO of Money Design

Yuta Tsuruoka, founder and CEO of Base

Yuzo Kano, founder and CEO of Bitflyer

Yosuke Tsuji, founder and CEO of Money Forward

Masa Nakatsu, founder and CEO of Orb

Paul Chapman, founder and CEO of Moneytree