Japan’s biggest bank is seeking to purchase robo-adviser through a tender offer at 1,950 yen a share and make it a wholly owned unit
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group plans to buy Japanese robo-adviser WealthNavi for as much as 99.7 billion yen (S$890.9 million), as it looks to expand its financial-technology capabilities and cater to households going online to invest more of their savings.
Japan’s biggest bank is seeking to purchase WealthNavi through a tender offer at 1,950 yen a share and make it a wholly owned unit, according to a filing on Friday (Nov 29). That represents an 84 per cent premium over the fintech company’s closing price on Thursday.
Japanese financial firms are expanding services to help households invest more of their US$7.5 trillion in cash as inflation emerges in Asia’s second-largest economy. More people have been opening so-called NISA accounts following the expansion of the country’s tax-free investment program this year, helping to fuel a stock-market rally.
MUFG took a 15 per cent stake in WealthNavi earlier this year. The Tokyo-based asset manager, which listed in 2020, had a market capitalisation of 62.8 billion yen before news of the deal emerged.
Shares of WealthNavi jumped 28 per cent, the most in almost four years, to 1,358 yen in Tokyo on Friday, after being untraded during the session. That pared this year’s decline to 30 per cent. MUFG gained 1.3 per cent, taking this year’s advance to 48 per cent.
Acquiring WealthNavi would boost MUFG’s prospects for “creating a more comprehensive finance super-app,” Koichi Niwa, an analyst at Citigroup in Tokyo, wrote in a note before the announcement. It would also help WealthNavi provide a full range of financial services on its platform, he added.
Founded by chief executive officer Kazuhisa Shibayama in 2015, WealthNavi provides online wealth management services, including automated transfers of cash to investment products. The company managed 1.34 trillion yen as of Oct 31, according to an earnings presentation. It expects operating profit of 531 million yen this year.
Japan’s robo-advisory market is projected to reach 3 trillion yen this fiscal year and forecast to grow to around 12 trillion yen by 2030, according to Yano Research Institute. BLOOMBERG
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