Received an email today pointing to https://www.sbishinseibank.co.jp/info/news240628_procedure_change_e.html?xadid=CCmail2207 — if you visit https://www.sbishinseibank.co.jp/english/sonota/ it will be mentioned the same
I moved to Japan few months ago and opened an account with them only recently… one of the items that sold me on SBI was English support… which I didn't need so far but seemed a good perk to have in case I had to face a difficult problem.
What are your thoughts on this? They dropped their Gaica, eliminated perks Shinsei used to have, pushing their brokerage vs Monex which I have read a lot of praise for.
[Edit: people in this thread seem framing this solely as a language issue, I’m more concerned it could make the bank less foreign friendly as a whole or turning into an inferior choice for the audience of this group, which happens to be foreign and English speaking]
by unfulvio
6 comments
I think one of the few things we need to understand is that English speaking foreigners are not actually the majority in Japan. It’s Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other Southeast Asians who make up majority of the foreign population. English speaking foreigners are a tiny fraction of the banking market.
I’m happy to keep using Sony bank. They seem fine and not going downhill atm. I also encourage everyone to learn Japanese as these things can happen at any time.
How many times have you actually called the customer service? Most of the things you need to do on Shinsei are online now either on the web portal or their app.
I hope that SBI Group can merge both the banks in their group and start to support PayEasy invoices. If this means that they have to give up on English support, I’ll take that trade TBH.
I use SBI, and I have never called. They did use a video translation when I opened my account. I keep a very close eye on their emails, as they have asked for a copy of my residence card on occasion.
SBI’s brokerage is pretty good, I don’t think worse than Monex (if anything my impression is better). But other than that yeah it looks like a downhill trend. All the more reason to switch to Sony.
Shinsei started with English support because they used to have American ownership. However, it never made much sense. English-speaking foreigners are a very small percentage of the foreigners in Japan. There are far, **far** more non-Japanese people from other countries who speak other languages. Here’s a list of the top 11 groups by country:
| Country | Foreigners |
|—————–|————-:|
| China | 744,551 |
| Vietnam | 476,346 |
| South Korea | 412,340 |
| Philippines | 291,066 |
| Brazil | 207,081 |
| Nepal | 125,798 |
| Indonesia | 83,169 |
| United States | 57,299 |
| Thailand | 54,618 |
| Taiwan | 54,213 |
| **Total** | **2,506,481** |
So, the US is the largest English speaking group, and it makes up about 2% of the top 11 groups.
Non-Japanese speakers are already a tiny percentage of the population in Japan, and English speaking foreigners are what, maybe 5% of that tiny group in total? If we say 3% of the population is foreign, and English speakers make up 5% of foreigners, that means an English service is targeting around 0.15% of the total population.
I expect to start seeing banks and other businesses offering more services in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc instead of English.
Edit: Table formatting.