According to reports citing sources familiar with the matter, Japan's investment giant SoftBank Group Corp., through its mobile operator SoftBank Corp., is moving closer to acquiring SP.LINKS Inc., a Japanese digital payment service provider owned by Blackstone. After being granted exclusive preferred bidder status, SoftBank is in advanced talks. Insiders say Blackstone will sell its 80% stake in SP.LINKS to SoftBank, with Sony Financial Group's banking unit offloading the remaining 20%. If the deal is finalized, the payment company will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank.
The second round of bidding took place in early July, with SoftBank and several private equity firms that advanced from the first round submitting offers. Blackstone organized multiple bidding rounds, and after SoftBank's second-round bid, it was selected as the preferred bidder. Typically, a seller grants this status after comparing offer amounts, financing certainty, deal terms, regulatory risks, and delivery capabilities, allowing the preferred bidder exclusive or priority negotiation rights before a final agreement is signed. This effectively sidelines other competitors and significantly increases the likelihood of a deal.
SoftBank Corp., controlled by SoftBank Group Corp. led by legendary investor Masayoshi Son, already owns SB Payment Service Corp. Sources indicate that SoftBank sees potential synergies from integrating SP.LINKS, including expanding business scale and sharing costs for anti-fraud measures. Representatives from SoftBank and Blackstone declined to comment. SP.LINKS provides credit card and electronic money payment settlement services for businesses. In January 2024, Blackstone acquired 80% of the company, then named Sony Payment Services Inc., from Sony Group for approximately 400 billion yen (about $245 million).
Being named a "preferred bidder" does not mean SoftBank has secured SP.LINKS shares; it signals the transaction has moved from a multi-party bidding phase to a final negotiation stage with SoftBank as the chosen buyer. With this status, SoftBank will engage in one-on-one talks with Blackstone and Sony Financial Group on final pricing, representations and warranties, liability terms, closing conditions, and transition arrangements, followed by confirmatory due diligence before signing a binding share purchase agreement. The deal structure is clear: Blackstone sells its 80% stake, Sony Financial's banking unit sells its 20%, and if both proceed, SoftBank will acquire 100% equity, making SP.LINKS a direct wholly-owned subsidiary without minority shareholder governance issues.
Blackstone originally acquired a majority stake in Sony Payment Services in 2024, with Sony Bank retaining a minority interest. As an industrial buyer, SoftBank may offer greater deal certainty than pure financial investors. With SB Payment Service already handling credit card, electronic money, and other payment processing, adding SP.LINKS could expand transaction volumes and share costs in payment systems, merchant resources, and anti-fraud investments. This synergy likely supports a more competitive bid, explaining why the seller selected SoftBank as a preferred bidder. However, "nearing acquisition" does not mean "completed." The deal could still fall through due to valuation adjustments, due diligence issues, disagreements on liability clauses, or unmet regulatory conditions before the final agreement is signed and closed.
Digital Payment Technology: Not a Supporting Role, but a Key Force in the AI Business Ecosystem
Amid Japan's accelerating shift from cash to digital payments, cashless payment penetration reached 58% in 2025, with transaction volumes around 163 trillion yen. Payment infrastructure is evolving from a mere fee-based business to a critical data pipeline connecting consumers, merchants, banks, and digital platforms. The deeper driver is that AI agent-driven automated payment transactions represent one of the most valuable real-world scenarios for training and deploying commercial AI. SB Payment Service processes over 5 trillion yen in payment data annually, using transaction information, browser characteristics, and behavioral data for real-time AI fraud scoring. SP.LINKS directly connects 16 credit card companies, offering high-speed settlement and a unique anti-fraud system based on matching bank attribute information.
Combining SB Payment Service's and SP.LINKS's digital payment networks gives SoftBank access to a broader range of merchant categories, payment paths, and fraud samples, enhancing anomaly detection, dynamic authentication, authorization success rates, chargeback management, and intelligent routing. The value extends beyond "finding more fraud" to reducing false rejections and improving payment conversion rates—translating cutting-edge AI model precision directly into merchant revenue and SoftBank's recurring service fees. This potential transaction aligns with Masayoshi Son's strategic shift from "investing in AI companies" to building an ASI (Super Artificial Intelligence) full-stack platform, adding a deeper layer of payment processing and risk data infrastructure between SoftBank's existing communication network, PayPay consumer entry point, SB Payment Service merchant settlement, OpenAI model capabilities, and AI data centers.
In 2026, SoftBank Group announced an additional $30 billion investment in OpenAI, with Son explicitly stating this would advance his ASI strategy. Concurrently, SoftBank Group and SoftBank Corp. established SB Neo, planning to develop cloud computing services based on up to 10-gigawatt-level energy and AI infrastructure, while SoftBank Corp. has set "Activate AI for Society" as its mid-term growth axis, emphasizing embedding AI commercialization capabilities across all its businesses. Computing centers and large models address "producing intelligence," while payment assets like SP.LINKS address "where intelligence lands, how it is monetized, and how feedback data is generated." SoftBank can package AI agent workflows, cloud services, cybersecurity, customer service automation, digital payment entry points, and payment risk control for merchants, transforming AI investment from a capital expenditure narrative into measurable transaction revenue.
SoftBank is already a major shareholder (holding nearly 90%) of Arm Holdings Plc, the owner of the ARM instruction set architecture used widely in consumer electronics and increasingly as the foundation for hyperscale data center server CPUs. SoftBank's extensive investments in Arm, Graphcore, and Ampere Computing, along with its latest massive investments in OpenAI and the U.S. "Stargate" AI infrastructure project, demonstrate a full-stack deployment from the lowest-level AI hardware architecture to AI computing infrastructure clusters to the AI application layer. SoftBank's AI super platform is no longer a single-point bet but an increasingly complete "ASI integrated stack": the bottom layer features Arm architecture and self-developed data center CPUs; the middle layer includes Graphcore Ltd., an AI chip design company fully acquired by SoftBank Group, and recently acquired Ampere; the top layer includes OpenAI, Stargate, and joint enterprise cloud AI computing platform deployments with Oracle, plus SB Neo as a new cloud force. Son has publicly stated that SoftBank's goal is to become the largest-scale AI computing and application-level infrastructure platform provider in the "Super Artificial Intelligence" era over the next decade, adopting an almost "all-in" aggressive investment stance towards OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and a global leader in AI large models.
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