corporate venture capital
Japanese banking giant Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) has made its first-ever investment through its new corporate venture capital (CVC) fund. The fund, named the "SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund" and launched in collaboration with Fin Capital, has participated in the recent $58 million funding round for WitnessAI,
artificial intelligence
Nowcast, a subsidiary of the Finatext Group, has successfully completed development and deployment of "DAM-AICore," a proprietary generative AI application tailored exclusively for Daiwa Asset Management. The move marks a significant step in the asset manager’s digital transformation (DX) strategy, combining a custom front-end AI interface with
artificial intelligence
au Jibun Bank has moved to bolster its internet banking security infrastructure, announcing the deployment of "AI Zero Fraud," a proprietary detection system developed by cybersecurity firm LAC. The integration, which went live during December 2025, represents a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence to mitigate the rising risk
artificial intelligence
MUFG Bank has formally adopted a data de-identification solution provided by Toronto-based Private AI to enhance its proprietary big data infrastructure, "OCEAN." The strategic move is designed to accelerate the bank’s utilization of unstructured data while maintaining rigorous privacy governance. Unlocking Unstructured Data for Generative AI MUFG
software engineering
JCB, Japan’s only international payment brand, has entered into a strategic AI partnership with IBM Japan to fundamentally restructure its core system development. By integrating IBM’s Generative AI platform, watsonx, JCB aims to transition away from traditional labor-intensive development models, positioning AI as a central "joint development
artificial intelligence
Japan's new AI Basic Plan, released as a draft on December 19, is framed as a national "counteroffensive" designed to reverse a perceived lag in artificial intelligence investment and utilization. The strategy directly confronts long-standing domestic challenges—including population decline, labor shortages, and stagnant wages—by
artificial intelligence
The rapid emergence of Generative AI represents a monumental technological leap, but the long-term trajectory of its advancement now faces a critical threat: an impending data exhaustion problem. The vast, publicly accessible datasets that fueled the current generation of models are finite and are being consumed at an unsustainable rate.
artificial intelligence
Mizuho Financial Group has developed a "finance-specialized LLM (Large Language Model)" trained on banking-specific business knowledge, rules, and procedures, which has achieved passing-level performance on banking practical exams. This model has acquired complex industry-specific rules and regulations unique to the financial sector, as well as internal procedures and
artificial intelligence
Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) has recently published the minutes for its third AI Public-Private Forum, held on November 5, 2025, which brought together a distinguished group of experts to chart a course for the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence in the financial sector. The forum's
artificial intelligence
Mizuho Financial Group is releasing the generative AI-powered platform "Wiz Base" and will earnestly promote large-scale PoCs (Proof of Concepts) in anticipation of full-scale implementation of AI utilization in the sales support domain. Wiz Base is a platform built by Mizuho on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to operate
debt financing
Resona Bank and Fivot have jointly established the venture debt fund "RFC Venture Debt Fund 1 Limited Investment Partnership", with the aim of expanding financing for domestic startup companies from seed to middle stage. Purpose and Background Small and medium-sized enterprises, which account for 99.7% of Japanese
artificial intelligence
Japan Digital Design (JDD) has developed a 70-billion parameter large language model (LLM) called "Llama-3.3-fintranslate-JDD-70b" specialized in translating financial market-related documents. In internal evaluations using actual business data, the model achieved performance exceeding global models such as GPT-4o. Additionally, JDD plans to soon begin providing a translation