Softbank

The online investment company Softbank has extended its wide-ranging presence on the web to include a number of new services, including consumer financing business as part of continued expansion. 

The organisation is made up of the following nine online companies: ETrade, E-Loan, InsWeb, CyberCash, Forexbank, Morningstar, E-Adviser, Softbank Investment, and Softbank Accounting. 

Their consumer finance creation - ENetCard - will be owned jointly by Softbank (49%) and Acom (51%), who hope to expand their online business through the alliance.   Acom will provide the loans and credit cards that are issued as a result of applications taken on the new company's website.

Other plans include Softbank Frontier Securities - a brokerage to deal in shares of unlisted companies, and ETrade Securities - a discount online brokerage which will launch in October. 

Etrade may take some time to justify the term "discount".  Its initial charges are 2,500 yen ($23) per trade for both limit and open-price share orders worth up to one million yen -- more than double the commission announced earlier this week by Monex, an online broker set up by Sony and former Goldman Sachs partner Oki Matsumoto.

Softbank executive vice president Yoshitaka Kitao acknowledged the relatively high brokerage fees, explaining: "We want to wait and look at market conditions," he said. "We don't want to make a large loss from the beginning."

Kitao points out that the nine online companies which form Softbank Finance will be linked to one another to form a strong "one-stop financial services" organisation.  "Our aim is to create the most powerful financial empire in Japan by making the most of the benefits of the Internet.