Nippon Credit Bank
 |
|
| Public KK, Limited | |
| Traded as |
|
| Industry | Money Center Banks |
| Predecessor | Nippon Credit Bank |
| Founded | April 1957 |
| Headquarters | Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan |
|
Key people
|
Brian F. Prince (Chairman) Shinsuke Baba (President and CEO) |
| Products |
Time deposits Investment trusts Individual annuity insurance Telephone banking services ATM alliances Personal loans Asset Management Consulting Services |
| Total assets | ¥5,082.5 B JPY (Sep. 2012) |
|
Number of employees
|
1,359 (Bank only) |
| Website | www.aozorabank.co.jp |
Aozora Bank, Ltd. (株式会社あおぞら銀行 Kabushiki-gaisha Aozora Ginkō, lit. "Blue Sky Bank") is a Japanese commercial bank that offers service in 19 branches in Japan and in 2 overseas representative offices (as of July 2012).
Aozora Bank is the successor of the Nippon Credit Bank (NCB), which was founded in 1957 as the Nippon Fudosan Bank under a special government trust banking license alongside the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan (LTCB). Nippon Fudosan Bank was itself based on the remaining assets of the Bank of Joseon in Japan.
In December 1998, NCB was brought under government control in order to deal with its extraordinary amount of bad debt left over from the crash of the Japanese asset price bubble in the early 1990s: at the time, the bank was approximately ¥270 billion in debt.
An investor group led by Softbank, Orix and Tokio Marine & Fire Insurance Co. purchased NCB in 2000 for ¥80 billion. As part of this deal, the government included a "defect warranty provision" (瑕疵担保条項 kashi tanpo jōkō) to the effect that NCB could demand within the next three years that the government purchase any claims which had fallen by twenty percent or more from value. A similar provision had controversially been offered to the purchasers of LTCB, which had recently been similarly purchased from the government and renamed Shinsei Bank. Aozora applied this provision conservatively in order to write off ¥400 billion in bad debts owed by about 100 companies, in contrast to Shinsei Bank, the contemporaneous successor of the Long-Term Credit Bank, which wrote off nearly three times as much and was criticized in political circles for doing so.
The sale of NCB to Softbank was viewed as a precedent for the licensing of Sony Bank, Seven Bank and other new banking platforms in Japan.
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Wikipedia