SoftBank aims to wholly acquire SP.LINKS Sun Zhengyi to reinforce Japan's digital payment base for “super artificial intelligence”

The Zhitong Finance App learned that some media quoted information revealed by people familiar with the matter as reporting that after receiving exclusive priority bidder status from SP.LINKS Inc., a Japanese digital payment service provider under the Kuroishi Group, SoftBank Corp (SoftBank Corp), a mobile operator under the Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group, is getting closer to completing the acquisition of the company.

People familiar with the matter said that Blackstone will sell 80% of its SP.LINKS shares to SoftBank, while the banking division under Sony Financial Group will sell the remaining 20% of its shares. Since the relevant information has not been made public, these individuals requested anonymity. If the deal is reached, the payment company will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank.

People familiar with the matter said that the second round of bidding was held in early July, and SoftBank and some private equity firms promoted from the first round of bidding all submitted offers.

According to media reports, citing information revealed by people familiar with the matter, Kuroishi took the lead in organizing multiple rounds of bidding. SoftBank and several private equity institutions submitted a second round of offers in early July, after which SoftBank was selected as the priority bidder. Normally, the seller will only grant the status of a bidder after a comprehensive comparison of the bid amount, financing certainty, transaction terms, regulatory risk, and delivery capacity; Japanese merger and acquisition practices also allow the seller to grant exclusive or preferential negotiation rights to the preferred bidder before signing a final agreement. As a result, competitors were generally excluded from negotiations, and the probability of completing the deal naturally increased significantly.

SoftBank, a mobile communications operator controlled by SoftBank Group Corp. (SoftBank Group Corp.), headed by legendary investor Sun Zhengyi, already owns SB Payment Service Corp. According to people familiar with the matter, SoftBank believes that incorporating SP.LINKS into the SoftBank Group is expected to have synergy effects, including expanding the scale of business and allocating costs associated with anti-fraud measures.

Representatives for SoftBank and Kuroishi both declined to comment.

SP.LINKS provides credit card and electronic money payment and settlement services for enterprises. In January 2024, Kuroishi acquired 80% of the company's shares from the Sony Group for about 40 billion yen (approximately US$245 million); at the time, the name of the company was still Sony Payment Services Inc.

Priority bidders

It is worth noting that obtaining a “preferred bidder” (preferred bidder) does not mean that SoftBank has obtained SP.LINKS shares, but rather that the transaction has moved from the “multi-party bidding phase” to the “final negotiation stage with SoftBank as the preferred buyer.”

After obtaining this qualification, SoftBank usually conducts one-on-one negotiations with Blackstone and Sony Financial Group on the final purchase price, statements and guarantees, liability, delivery terms and transition arrangements, and completes the final stage of confirmatory due diligence before signing a legally binding share purchase agreement. The transaction structure is also relatively clear: Blackstone plans to sell 80% of its shares, and banks under the Sony Financial Group plan to sell the remaining 20%; if both parties sell according to the plan, SoftBank can obtain 100% of the shares at once, making SP.LINKS directly a wholly-owned subsidiary without having to continue dealing with minority shareholder governance issues. Kuroishi initially acquired a majority stake in what was then called Sony Payment Services in 2024, and Sony Bank retained a minority interest.

SoftBank's transaction certainty as a buyer of the industry may also be higher than that of a simple financial investor. SoftBank already owns SB Payment Service, which is engaged in payment processing services for credit cards, electronic money, and other payment methods; after SP.LINKS is incorporated into the group, it can expand the scale of transactions and share costs in payment systems, merchant resources, and anti-fraud investments. As a result, SoftBank may be able to support more competitive offers through synergy effects, which is a reasonable explanation for it being listed as a preferred bidder by the seller.

“Close to acquisition” is still not equal to “already closed.” Before the final agreement is signed and delivered, it may still fail due to valuation adjustments, due diligence findings, failure of the parties to agree on liability clauses, or failure to meet approval conditions.

Digital payment technology is not a supporting actor, but an important force in the closed loop of the AI business ecosystem

In the context of Japan's accelerated digitalization and digitization of cash payments, the share of cashless payments has risen to 58% in 2025, with a transaction scale of about 163 trillion yen. The payment infrastructure is being upgraded from a simple fee business to a key data channel connecting consumers, merchants, banks and digital platforms.

The deeper driving force is that automatic payment transactions with AI agents are one of the most valuable real-world scenarios for training and deploying commercial AI. SB Payment Service processes more than 5 trillion yen of payment data each year, and uses transaction information, browser characteristics, and behavioral data for real-time AI fraud scoring; SP.LINKS directly connects 16 credit card companies, has high-speed settlement capabilities and a unique anti-fraud system based on bank attribute information matching.

By combining SB Payment Service with SP.Links's two digital payment networks, SoftBank can obtain richer merchant categories, payment routes, and fraud samples to improve anomaly identification, dynamic authentication, authorization success rate, chargeback management, and intelligent routing capabilities. Its value is not only to “find more fraud,” but also to reduce false transaction rejections and increase payment conversion rates — directly transforming the accuracy of cutting-edge AI models into merchant revenue and SoftBank's recurring service fees.

This important potential deal also fits Sun Zhengyi's strategy of moving from “investing in AI companies” to building an ASI (Super Artificial Intelligence) full-stack platform, and adds a deeper layer of payment processing and risk data infrastructure between SoftBank's existing communication network, PayPay consumer portal, SB Payment Service merchant settlement, OpenAI model capabilities, and AI data centers.

SoftBank Group announced an additional investment of 30 billion US dollars in OpenAI in 2026, and Sun Zhengyi clearly stated that it would use this to advance its ASI strategy; at the same time, SoftBank Group and SoftBank established SB Neo to develop cloud computing power services based on up to 10 gigawatts of energy and AI infrastructure, and SoftBank also established “Activate AI for Society” as the main axis of medium term growth, emphasizing embedding AI commercialization capabilities into all of its businesses. Computing power centers and big models solve “production intelligence,” while payment assets such as SP.LINKS solve the problem of “where intelligence is implemented, how to charge, and how to form feedback data”: SoftBank can package and sell enterprise AI agent workflows, cloud services, network security, customer service automation, digital payment entry, and payment risk control to merchants, transforming AI investment from capital expenditure narratives into measurable transaction revenue.

SoftBank is already a major shareholder (holding close to 90%) of Arm Holdings Plc, the owner of the ARM instruction set architecture. Arm's instruction set architecture technology is widely used throughout the consumer electronics industry, and is increasingly used as the infrastructure for hyperscale data center-level server CPU product lines.

SoftBank's huge investment scale in recent years in Arm, Graphcore, and Ampere Computing, as well as the latest combined investment in OpenAI and the US “Stargate” AI infrastructure project, shows its full-stack layout from the lowest AI hardware architecture to the AI computing power infrastructure cluster to the AI application layer.

The AI superplatform that SoftBank is now building is no longer a single point bet, but an increasingly complete “ASI integrated stack”: the bottom layer includes Arm architecture and Armself-developed data center CPUs; the middle layer includes GraphCore Ltd., a British AI chip design company fully acquired by SoftBank Group, and Ampere, which was officially acquired recently; the upper layer includes OpenAI, Stargate (or “Stargate”), and the enterprise-level cloud AI computing power platform layout with Oracle, plus SB Neo, a new cloud power ( Neocloud); Meanwhile, Sun Zhengyi himself has already publicly stated that SoftBank's goal is to become the largest AI computing power and application-level basic platform provider under the “Super Artificial Intelligence” (ASI) era in the next ten years, and has adopted an almost “all in” aggressive investment attitude for ChatGPT developer and global AI model leader OpenAI.