Shopping, credit cards, bank accounts, stock trading. If you use Rakuten, you know these services well, and they are about to be bundled into a single app. Rakuten Group has restarted the reorganization of its financial businesses. Whether Japan gets a working super app out of it is the open question.

Banking, Securities and Credit Cards to Integrate by October

On February 25, 2026, Rakuten Group officially announced the restart of discussions to reorganize its financial subsidiaries. The plan centers on Rakuten Bank as the hub, consolidating Rakuten Card, Rakuten Securities Holdings, and other financial operations into a single group by October 2026.

This is Rakuten's second attempt. The company announced similar talks in April 2024 and withdrew them five months later, in September, saying the merger was not necessarily optimal for expanding its fintech business or its competitive position. It prioritized mobile telecom instead. The business environment changed, and so did the judgment.

Why Now? The Forces Behind the Restart

The biggest driver is Japan's return to a "world with interest rates." The Bank of Japan's rate hikes have intensified competition for deposits among banks. Major banking groups are pouring resources into retail financial services, and Japan's telecom giants, NTT Docomo, KDDI, and SoftBank, are all racing to build their own financial ecosystems.

The second catalyst is generative AI. As data integration becomes critical for AI-powered services, having financial operations scattered across separate legal entities makes rapid decision-making and data sharing nearly impossible. Rakuten sees unification as the only path to competitive AI deployment across its financial services.

How the New Structure Will Work

The reorganization envisions Rakuten Bank as the parent company, with Rakuten Card and Rakuten Securities Holdings placed under its umbrella. Rakuten Bank will maintain its listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Prime Market. Life and non-life insurance operations are excluded from this round of restructuring.

The complication at that point was Mizuho Financial Group, which held 14.99% of Rakuten Card and 49% of Rakuten Securities. How those stakes would be restructured was still being negotiated.

Rakuten Bank has 17.63 million accounts, the most of any online bank in Japan, and Rakuten Card has issued roughly 33 million cards. The plan is to funnel cardholders into bank accounts and grow the bank to a 33 million account base.

The Unified App Vision

The consumer-facing centerpiece is a single financial app. Today, Rakuten users juggle separate apps for banking, credit cards and securities. A unified app would put deposit balances, card spending and investment portfolios on one screen and cut duplicated identity verification (KYC) steps.

This vision represents the financial nerve center of the "Rakuten Ecosystem" (Rakuten Keizaiken), a concept unique to Japan where a single corporate group connects over 70 services spanning e-commerce, travel, telecom, digital content, and even professional sports through a unified loyalty points system called Rakuten Points. For Rakuten, merging its financial apps is about creating the central nervous system of this vast ecosystem.

How Rakuten Compares to Global Super Apps

Where does Rakuten's plan sit within the global super app landscape?

China: Alipay & WeChat Pay China pioneered the super app concept. Alibaba's Alipay serves 1.3 billion users and processes over 100 million daily transactions, offering payments, wealth management, insurance, credit scoring (Sesame Credit), and travel booking. Tencent's WeChat Pay, embedded within the 1.2-billion-user WeChat platform, turns a messaging app into a complete operating system for daily life, from social media and government services to bill payments and investments. In China, cash and credit cards are essentially obsolete; a single smartphone handles everything.

Southeast Asia: Grab & GoTo In Southeast Asia, super apps grew from ride-hailing roots. Singapore-based Grab serves 187 million users across the region, expanding from transportation and food delivery into digital banking, insurance, and microloans for small businesses. Indonesia's GoTo (the merger of Gojek and Tokopedia) similarly spans ride-hailing to financial services, playing a crucial role in financial inclusion for the region's large unbanked population.

United States: Apple Card, Goldman Sachs & the X Dream The super app model has struggled in Western markets. Apple partnered with Goldman Sachs to launch Apple Card and a savings account product, but Goldman has been retreating from consumer banking, casting doubt on the partnership's future. Elon Musk has declared ambitions to turn X (formerly Twitter) into an "everything app," but progress has been minimal. PayPal and Block's Cash App are evolving toward broader financial ecosystems, but in a market where Google and Apple's smartphone operating systems already function as de facto platforms, building a super app on top of a super app presents a fundamental structural challenge.

Rakuten's Unique Position What sets Rakuten apart is owning all three pillars, e-commerce, finance and telecom, inside one corporate group. Alipay and WeChat grew by absorbing outside services onto their platforms; Rakuten built everything in-house. The vertical integration is an advantage, and it is also why losses in one division, mobile above all, travel through the whole group.

Rakuten Mobile's Losses and the Reorganization

Any discussion of the reorganization has to address Rakuten Mobile. For fiscal 2025, Rakuten Group posted record revenue of about ¥2.5 trillion ($16.1 billion), up 9.5% year on year. The bottom line was a net loss of ¥177.8 billion (about $1.15 billion), the seventh consecutive annual loss. The mobile business alone posted an operating loss of ¥161.8 billion, ¥47 billion narrower than the year before.

Rakuten Mobile passed 10 million subscribers in December 2025 and turned its first full-year EBITDA profit. But impairment charges on telecom infrastructure and interest on high-yield bonds still weigh heavily. The consolidated equity ratio is a thin 3.4%, and free cash flow ran a deficit of about ¥355.7 billion ($2.3 billion). A large tranche of Rakuten Mobile-related bonds comes due for redemption in 2027.

Against that backdrop, the reorganization invites an obvious question: growth strategy or survival mechanism? Rakuten's fintech segment generated ¥975.9 billion (about $6.3 billion) in revenue, up 19% year on year, making it the group's biggest earner. But cash held at the bank and the brokerage cannot move freely to the parent or sibling companies, because banking and securities law and solvency requirements stand in the way. Placing the subsidiaries under Rakuten Bank would at least let entities like Rakuten Card fund themselves more cheaply through the bank, lowering group financing costs.

To address concerns about conflicts of interest, particularly for Rakuten Bank's minority shareholders, the bank has established a special committee of independent outside directors. Rakuten Group's Chairman and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani will not participate in Rakuten Bank's board deliberations on the reorganization.

Japan's Fintech Race Enters a New Phase

Rakuten's move signals that the axis of Japan's fintech competition has moved. The battlefield is no longer telecom pricing but the combined strength of each company's ecosystem. NTT Docomo, KDDI and SoftBank are all expanding financial services; Rakuten's edge is owning e-commerce, finance and telecom under one roof, and its handicap is seven straight years of losses.

Globally, the super app frenzy has cooled. Attention has shifted from everything apps toward vertical super apps that go deep in one domain. Rakuten's financial consolidation runs with that current.

If the October 2026 integration lands, Rakuten becomes a comprehensive fintech entity without precedent in Japan. Whether that is Japan's Alipay or something else, nobody yet knows.

In Japan, Rakuten's unique "ecosystem" model bundles e-commerce, telecom, and financial services under one corporate umbrella. Is super app-style financial integration happening in your country? Would you want one app handling your bank account, investments, and credit card, or does that concentration of services make you nervous? Share your country's experience!

Update: On May 20, 2026, Rakuten Group and Rakuten Bank announced the final agreement. Rakuten Bank will make Rakuten Card and Rakuten Securities Holdings its subsidiaries through a share delivery, effective October 1, 2026, with the transfer of out-of-scope businesses to be completed by September 30. Rakuten Bank's annual shareholders meeting was held on June 24. Mizuho will withdraw its roughly 15% stake in Rakuten Card and take a 5.8% stake in Rakuten Bank instead, while keeping its 49% of Rakuten Securities. Rakuten Group expects the reorganization to generate ¥85 billion in annual profit, though Rakuten Bank shares fell limit-down on the first session after the announcement. As of the end of March 2026, Rakuten Bank had 18.07 million accounts, Rakuten Card 33.87 million cards issued, and Rakuten Securities 13.87 million general accounts. (As of August 2026)

References