Message from the CEO

This question reminds me of an old British anecdote I was told so many times I could never forget it. My boss shared it with me back in the early 2000s when I was just starting my career in asset management after graduating from university.

It goes like this: "In the U.K., if you are intelligent but have a poor family background, you go into investment bank. If you have a good family background but are not so intelligent, you go into insurance firm. Only those who are both intelligent and from a good family can enter asset management."

Needless to say, the point of this story isn’t to disparage those who work at investment bank or insurance firms. Rather, it illustrates the high level of esteem the asset management profession holds in the U.K. At the time, we were inspired by this idea, aspiring to build an industry in Japan that would be respected in the same way.

More than two decades have passed. Is our industry today any closer to the vision we had back then? The number of people employed in asset management hasn't grown significantly, and its contribution to the national GDP and tax revenue seems largely unchanged. I’ve also heard that Japan’s services account balance for the financial sector recently recorded its largest deficit ever.

I believe this stagnation stems from the Japanese financial industry's rigid, vertically integrated business structure—in short, a business model built on a "do-it-yourself" mentality. This approach prevents firms from concentrating strategic resources on their core strengths. As a result, both individual financial institutions and the industry as a whole remain trapped in a state of low productivity and profitability compared to their Western counterparts.

This is where Japan Asset Management Platform comes in. We serve as the foundational “platform” to help rebuild the industry’s business model. We liberate financial institutions from the constraints of the "do-it-yourself" approach, enabling them to focus on their unique strengths by collaborating with external partners—both financial and non-financial—who possess complementary capabilities. Our mission is to build a track record of success by optimizing the business of each client, with the ultimate goal of optimizing the entire Japanese financial industry.

For Japan, now in a mature phase of its economy, the role of the asset management industry is undeniably critical—both as an engine for economic growth and as essential infrastructure for helping individuals achieve a prosperous future. The industry itself must also prosper in its role of supporting both personal wealth and national growth. This is the vision that we at Japan Asset Management Platform are striving to realize for Japan’s asset management industry by 2050.