But beginning Oct. 1, he will lead his tiny investment house into battle against dozens of other brokerages, big and small. On that day, for the first time, Japanese stock brokers will be able to set share-trading commissions at whatever price they like. Up to now, the sales charges for stock traded on Japanese bourses like the Tokyo Stock Exchange have been established by the exchanges and kept artificially high, which helped to ensure brokerages had a stable income but discouraged competition. The liberalization of these commission rates is a milestone in the ongoing deregulation of Japan's financial services industry, which is dubbed the Big Bang. And Matsui expects that his pipsqueak of a company, Matsui Securities, will be one of the few homegrown Japanese companies still standing at the end.
Web investing in Japan remains tiny compared with the U.S., but it is growing fast.
There are probably close to 100,000 online trading accounts in Japan today, a number that one expert expects to increase six-fold by the end of next year. By comparison, the U.S. has around 8 million such accounts. Matsui's was not the first online brokerage service in Japan when it debuted last May, but it has certainly been among the most successful. The company had 7,000 online accounts to start the year and is now, according to Matsui, adding them at the rate of 100 per day. At that rate, the company could have more than 45,000 online accounts by the end of the year.