The Toss Cheer Securities purchase will take Viva Republica, the South Korean company behind the Toss finance app, into Japanese retail investing. The board of Tokai Tokyo Financial Holdings approved on October 30 the sale of all 955,000 shares in Cheer Securities, its smartphone-only brokerage, to Toss Global, Viva Republica’s Singapore-based overseas unit.
Neither side disclosed a price. Nikkei estimated it at about ¥4 billion, roughly 34 billion won, and said the parties aim to close within Japan’s fiscal 2026, which ends in March 2027. The deal still needs approval from Japanese regulators. Tokai Tokyo set up Cheer in 2019, and its app lets customers trade Japanese and US stocks and investment trusts from as little as ¥500. Toss plans to keep Cheer’s registration as a Type 1 financial instruments business operator, and Viva Republica told Yonhap that Cheer’s legal status and existing customers’ accounts would not change.
Toss arrives with a profitable broker at home. Toss Securities posted a record first-half net profit of 236.8 billion won this year, according to The Asia Business Daily. It is also the second Korean firm in two days to buy a Japanese broker: Mirae Asset Securities disclosed on October 29 that its US subsidiary will acquire all of Sanko Securities.
Why it matters: Buying Cheer gives Toss a registered Japanese broker and a working app from the first day, so it can test whether the simple mobile design that built Toss Securities in Korea wins over the young Japanese investors Nikkei says it is targeting. At about ¥4 billion, the price is a small fraction of Toss Securities’ half-year profit, which limits the cost of failure. The harder test is scale against SBI Securities and Rakuten Securities, the two largest online brokers in Japan, and none of the reports gave Cheer’s customer or asset figures.
Source: Nikkei Asia, October 30, 2026; The Asia Business Daily, October 30, 2026; Yonhap, October 30, 2026; Seoul Economic Daily, November 1, 2026
Image: Kakidai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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