This rockstar banker from Japan built a startup that fuses media and fintech

Kazumasa Tomita was a rockstar at Nomura Securities, Japan’s largest (and oldest) brokerage firm. He entered the private banking department fresh out of university, dealing solely with high-net-worth individuals. In his first year, Kazumasa set the sales record for Nomura’s private banking division. By his third year, he was the top salesperson in the entire company.

With a streak like that, you’d probably expect him to ride the wave and retire young. Really young. But instead of sailing off into the sunset on a giant yacht, Kazumasa left Nomura to build a startup. He hasn’t left the world of finance entirely, though.

In his college days, he built a social marketing startup out of his dorm room. Despite his many milestones and superlatives as a banker, Kazumasa’s entrepreneurial spirit remained. A traditional bank, with its endless sales cycles, was too rigid for him. The longer he spent at Nomura, the more frustrated he became.

“I never actually considered spending my whole career in finance,” he tells Tech in Asia. “I noticed so many inefficiencies in the traditional corporate finance world. You could buy a mutual fund online with a commission of less than one percent, but Nomura and the other big firms would charge three to four percent. Since the bank’s mission is to generate commissions, brokers encourage an endless stream of buying and selling.”

“Initially, I thought these issues only existed in Japan, but I encountered the same issues in Singapore and the US as well,” he continues. “I realized there are so many opportunities for innovating the finance industry.”

Two and a half years ago, after resigning from his lucrative gig at Nomura, Kazumasa founded Zuu, one of Japan’s largest and fastest growing finance-related media sites. It offers a variety of news and columns related to banking, securities, equity, real estate, insurance, and taxes – each written by an expert in one of those sectors. While many of Japan’s hottest media-related startups focus on “curation” (Japan’s preferred term for aggregation), Zuu focuses entirely on original content. But that’s not all.

Flexibility

Zuu Online currently attracts 2.5 million monthly unique users and more than 10 million total monthly pageviews. Kazumasa says its user base has grown 17-fold since last year.

More than 600 contributors from Zuu’s network of 5,000 Japanese finance industry insiders submit between 20 and 30 articles per day. Another 80 in the US produce content for the English language sister site, though it hasn’t been updated since January. Traction data for that version is undisclosed, as the team has been focused on growing its domestic presence first.

The English (US) version of Zuu Online.

“Many of our competitors are focusing on aggregation, producing only two or three original finance-specific articles a day,” Kazumasa says.

With professional writers commanding upwards of JPY 30,000 (US$250) per article, it would be difficult for a startup to afford such a large amount of content. Zuu gets away with paying them just JPY 3,000-5,000 (US$25-42) by offering flexibility.

“We let our network of professionals choose what to write about,” Kazumasa explains. “They can write anytime, with no deadline, so it’s a good use of their free time.”

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