The LSE Directory / Retail brokers
Rakuten Securities is a Tokyo-based online brokerage and financial subsidiary of Japanese internet conglomerate Rakuten Group. It offers trading in Japanese and foreign equities (including US, Chinese and other Asian markets), investment trusts and mutual funds, government and corporate bonds, foreign exchange margin trading, CFDs, futures and options, and precious metals, alongside tax-advantaged NISA and iDeCo retirement savings accounts. Customers trade through the MarketSpeed II desktop platform, the iSPEED mobile app or the iGrow automated asset-building app, and can access managed portfolios through robo-advisor services. The firm's differentiation is integration with the wider Rakuten ecosystem rather than any single product line: customers can fund trades and earn or redeem Rakuten Points across the group's e-commerce, banking and card businesses, and can link settlement and cash-sweep functions with Rakuten Bank and Rakuten Card. Its KabuPita service lets retail customers buy Japanese stocks from 100 yen in 1 yen increments, and the firm eliminated standard commissions on domestic stock trading in October 2023, competing chiefly with SBI Securities for Japan's mass-retail, first-time-investor segment; the company has said the large majority of its new account holders have no prior investing experience. Since 2015 it has also expanded into Asia through acquisitions, including FXCM Asia's Hong Kong forex business in 2015, FXAsia Pty Ltd in Australia in 2016, and a joint venture with Kenanga Investment Bank in Malaysia in 2017 that launched as that country's first fully online equities brokerage. The business traces to DLJdirect SFG Securities, a joint venture between DLJdirect and Sumitomo Bank formed in 1999 to take advantage of Japan's 1998 deregulation of brokerage commissions; Rakuten acquired it in November 2003 and renamed it Rakuten Securities in 2004. It now sits under intermediate holding company Rakuten Securities Holdings, Inc., in which Mizuho Securities holds roughly 49% of Rakuten Securities following a share transfer agreed in November 2023 (an initial 19.99% stake dated to October 2022), with Rakuten Securities Holdings retaining 51% and Rakuten Securities continuing to consolidate into Rakuten Group. A planned Tokyo Stock Exchange listing, applied for in July 2023, was shelved that same November and the listing policy was formally withdrawn in January 2025 in favor of deeper collaboration with Mizuho. The company is regulated in Japan as a Financial Instruments Business Operator under the Kanto Financial Bureau. It surpassed 14 million general securities customer accounts in April 2026, which it states is the largest non-consolidated account count of any Japanese securities company, and separately reports the largest NISA account base in the industry (citing Japan's Financial Services Agency survey data), with NISA accounts above 7 million and NISA balances exceeding 10 trillion yen as of December 2025; total assets under custody had already passed 30 trillion yen in June 2024. As of May 2026, Rakuten Securities was preparing, alongside rival SBI Securities, an in-house cryptocurrency investment trust that would give customers exposure to Bitcoin and Ether through their existing brokerage accounts rather than a separate crypto exchange; launch is contingent on Japan's Financial Services Agency finalizing rules that would reclassify crypto assets as financial products under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act.
