Broad-Minded Co.,Ltd. Q4 FY2026 earnings call

• Corporate Purpose & Value Proposition: Broadmind's purpose is 'Unleash the power of finance', with a mission to bring ethics to finance and freedom to life. The company positions itself as a one-stop solution for customer financial needs across insurance, securities, banking, and real estate, focused on helping customers achieve customized life plans, rather than pushing individual financial products.
• Competitive Advantages:
  1. Stable, organization-level customer acquisition model: Partners with large credit card companies, fintech firms, government agencies, and other trusted partners to generate consistent high-quality leads, avoiding reliance on individual sales networks.
  2. Differentiated human resource and training strategy: Over 90% of consultants are new graduates, with a 13% 3-year turnover rate (far below the 58% industry average). The company uses a fixed salary model (instead of the industry-standard full commission structure) to enable stable long-term career growth, and maintains an open collaborative culture that encourages open consultation across all levels of the organization. The model produces 2.5x higher annual new premium per consultant than the industry average.
  3. Proprietary in-house digital tools: BroadTalk (online meeting tool that supports recording, monitoring, and compliance checks, enabling efficient group training for new consultants) and MoneyPass (life planning app that visualizes both insurance and asset allocation in one interface). Currently over 80% of consultations are conducted online, improving productivity to 6-7 meetings per day (up from 3 in-person meetings per day) with no travel costs.
• Core Growth Strategy: The company pursues growth through dual pillars: increasing new customer acquisition and improving lifetime value (LTV) of existing customers. Monthly consultations through partner channels have grown to 1,500-2,000, and the consultant headcount grew from ~160 in FY2021 March to 247 in FY2025 March. For existing customers, the company accumulates life plan data to deliver targeted proposals aligned with changing life stages (e.g., marriage, childbirth, retirement planning) at low incremental marketing cost, improving overall profit margins.
• New Domain Initiatives:
  1. Generative AI for sales processes: Developing a generative AI tool to handle the initial customer needs hearing and demand discovery stage (a highly personality-dependent step in consulting) to improve quality and efficiency. The company targets internal rollout in Q3 FY2025 (Oct-Dec 2025), with long-term plans to offer the AI consulting platform to external insurance companies, agencies, via direct sales or OEM.
  2. Burokkori corporate employee financial education service: A corporate welfare program focused on improving financial well-being, already adopted by major firms including SCSK and Nissin Group. It drives incremental high-margin consulting revenue for Broadmind, creating a win-win model for client firms and the company.
  3. Money With online financial education school: Launched in May 2025 as a joint venture, with two core courses: a basic course for general consumers to build personal financial literacy, and an FP (financial planner) training course for people seeking to use skills for side income, career changes, or skill improvement. The school also acts as a strategic recruitment channel to source pre-trained, motivated talent for Broadmind's sales organization, reducing training costs and accelerating hiring growth.

Segment-level financial performance data (absolute revenue figures, revenue contribution percentages) is not provided in the available transcript. Core business segments noted are core financial consulting (insurance, asset planning, cross-product financial services), new digital tools/AI services, corporate financial education services, and financial education school operations.

• Current fiscal year guidance: After the planned sale of the ManePro Shop business in Q1, revenue will maintain year-over-year comparable levels, and operating profit will recover. The sale enables the company to focus management resources on its core high-margin consulting business, with continued planned sales growth for its life insurance and IFA-focused organization.
• Dividend guidance: The company maintains a policy of balancing growth investment and shareholder returns, targeting 100% payout ratio by FY2027 March. For the current fiscal year, the company plans a dividend of 60 yen per share, an 18 yen increase from the prior period's 42 yen, with a target of continued stable dividend increases going forward.

• No explicit discussion of material operational failures or current financial risks is included in the available transcript. Structural industry risks noted include: industry-wide high turnover, traditional sales models that rely on individual prospecting and push product-first selling, and growing consumer resistance to in-person home consultations. The company frames its current strategy as a response to these industry risks.

Q: What is the background behind Broadmind's focus on hiring and training new graduate, inexperienced hires instead of experienced mid-career hires? / A: CEO Ito, a former Sony Life employee, observed that the traditional insurance industry forces salespeople to spend 90% of their time generating their own leads, forcing great client-facing consultants to quit if they cannot build a prospect base. The old industry culture also prioritizes product-first selling over client needs. Retraining experienced salespeople to adopt a new client-centric model is slower than training new hires from scratch. The company provides leads centrally, so new hires can focus on consulting instead of prospecting, and fixed salaries let consultants build long-term client relationships instead of prioritizing short-term sales. This aligns with the company's focus on long-term value for both employees and clients.

Q: What does the company's positioning as a 'financial service development company' mean? / A: It refers to building new financial services, not just developing new financial products. Early on, the company pioneered offering financial advisory services to member organizations to address members' financial anxieties, which became the foundation of its current business. It was also an early adopter of online consulting, with over 80% of consultations now online, which is uncommon among domestic insurance agencies and fits modern consumer preferences for avoiding in-person home visits. This focus on innovating service models to meet changing client needs is core to the positioning.

Q: What is the current accuracy of the generative AI hearing tool the company is building, given common challenges with Japanese language AI? / A: The company has already observed that the technology is progressing extremely rapidly, after recent discussions with Microsoft. Most AI adoption in insurance so far focuses on back-office cost cutting, with almost no adoption of generative AI for frontline sales processes. The company is doing deep learning with existing consultation data and already expects to achieve very high accuracy for initial needs discovery. Adopting this technology is critical to address future labor shortages, and fits well with the company's existing online-first operational model.

Q: What is the current progress and inquiry traction for the new Money With financial education school? / A: Money With opened in May 2025, and already had multiple students enroll in the first month, with continued inquiries and new enrollments coming in consistently. This demonstrates strong market interest in FP skills training, which aligns with the company's goal of building a new talent pipeline. The school already has enrolled salespeople from existing insurance companies looking to improve their consulting skills.