PayPay Bank Brand Guidelines: Japan Net Bank of 2000, a 2021 Rename & a PayPay Parent

A bank built for the early internet.

PayPay Bank was founded as The Japan Net Bank, usually shortened to JNB. Japanese Wikipedia says Sakura Bank, one of the predecessors of today’s SMBC, began studying an internet bank in the late 1990s as the number of Japanese internet users climbed, and reached a basic agreement with Fujitsu, then the owner of the online service Nifty. NTT Docomo, whose i-mode phone internet was spreading fast, and the insurer Nippon Life also joined.

The bank was established on 19 September 2000 and opened on 12 October 2000, according to its company profile. Japanese Wikipedia lists the founding shareholders as Sakura Bank with half the capital, Sumitomo Bank, Fujitsu and Nippon Life with smaller stakes, and Tokyo Electric Power, Mitsui & Co., NTT East and NTT Docomo with the rest. The bank describes itself as Japan’s first internet-only bank, a claim repeated on its corporate site and on the page announcing its new name.

The bank says it began card loans in 2001, partnered with Yahoo Japan the same year as the official bank of Yahoo! Auctions, and joined the E-net network of convenience-store cash machines in April 2001 and the post office network in 2002. It reached one million accounts in December 2004, Japanese Wikipedia says. In 2006 it introduced hardware tokens that generate one-time passwords and, the bank says, became the first bank to offer foreign-exchange margin trading, under the name JNB-FX.

From Yahoo to PayPay.

Ownership shifted towards the internet group in stages. In June 2006, Japanese Wikipedia says, Japan Net Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Yahoo Japan signed a capital and business alliance, and in September 2006 the bank issued new shares to SMBC and Yahoo, which then held equal economic stakes while SMBC kept most of the voting rights. In April 2014 the bank says Yahoo received approval as a major shareholder, and in February 2018 it became a consolidated subsidiary of Yahoo. In November 2018 it began a payment link with PayPay, the smartphone payment service.

On 31 July 2020 the board decided to change the name, and on 15 September 2020 it fixed the date. Japan Net Bank became PayPay Bank Corporation on 5 April 2021. The bank’s name-change page told customers that its bank code, branch names and account numbers stayed the same, moved email and website addresses to the paypay-bank.co.jp domain, and stopped accepting transfers in the old name from 2 July 2021. The same day it launched an ATM service that works with a smartphone app instead of a card.

The last step came in 2025. Japanese Wikipedia says LY Corporation and Z Financial announced on 17 December 2024 that they would transfer all their shares to PayPay Corporation, and that the purchase was completed on 11 April 2025. CNET Japan reported in May 2025 that the bank had become a PayPay subsidiary in April and had added a payment method that draws directly on a customer’s PayPay Bank balance; the bank announced 9 million deposit accounts on 1 May 2025, CNET Japan reported, and says it passed 10 million in April 2026.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s internet and retail-group banks present themselves mostly through screens rather than branches. Sony Bank opened in 2001 with a service website, MONEYKit, instead of a branch network, and Rakuten Bank, which began in 2000 as eBANK Corporation, calls itself an internet-only bank. Their pages are organised around everyday tasks: deposits in yen and foreign currencies, card and home loans, investment trusts and, more and more, apps and account opening by smartphone.

Many carry the name of a larger consumer group. Rakuten Bank took its parent’s name in 2010, and Sony Bank belongs to Sony Financial Group. The banks set a Japanese name beside a Latin one — 楽天銀行 with Rakuten Bank, ソニー銀行 with Sony Bank — so the same name has to work in two scripts on cards, apps and statements.

Cash is still part of the picture, and it is reached through other companies’ machines. Rather than building large ATM networks of their own, these banks connect to machines in convenience stores and other banks: Rakuten Bank’s 2010 tie-ups with E-net and Lawson put its cards into FamilyMart, Ministop and Lawson stores, and Sony Bank’s history lists connections with Seven Bank, Lawson, E-net and Aeon Bank. Card faces have become a place for character illustration, as with Sony Bank’s PlayStation and PEANUTS designs.

Behind the consumer pages sits a more formal layer of disclosure sections, press releases and investor documents. This guide sets out what can be checked about each bank — who set it up, who owns it and when its name changed — and marks clearly what rests on the bank’s own word.

A bank with branches named after birds.

The company profile lists the head office in a Yotsuya tower in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where Japanese Wikipedia says it moved in May 2025. As of 28 April 2025 the profile lists PayPay Corporation with about three-quarters of the voting rights and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation with about a fifth, with Fujitsu and two life insurers holding small stakes. PayPay itself belongs to the SoftBank group. The bank’s 2026 top message describes the aim of being “the bank most used on smartphones in Japan” and a group-wide idea called “One Big Team,” under which the PayPay app shows bank balances, top-ups and transfers.

Like other Japanese internet banks it keeps playful branch names. Japanese Wikipedia says its first service branches, opened in 2006 for one-time transfers, took the names of constellations, and that other branches are named after trees and birds: sparrow, falcon and owl in the Japan Net Bank years, and swallow, kingfisher, bush warbler and crested ibis under PayPay Bank, with flamingo and penguin branches as well. There are no passbooks, and only the head office has a counter. The bank says it began issuing Visa debit cash cards in December 2013 and redesigned the card in November 2018, when it added Visa contactless payment as standard.

The 2021 rename was a brand decision as much as a legal one. The bank’s name-change page frames it as carrying forward twenty years of Japan Net Bank’s work into the PayPay brand, and the bank later released a mini app inside PayPay itself, in August 2022. In June 2026 it joined au Jibun Bank, Aeon Bank and SBI Shinsei Bank in an agreement to share information on misuse of home loans, according to au Jibun Bank.

For a design guide, PayPay Bank shows how a bank can trade a long-standing descriptive name for the brand of a payment app its customers already use. Compare SoftBank, the group behind PayPay, and au Jibun Bank, another mobile-network bank. For this guide we use a crimson, a slate and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PayPay Bank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.