Japan’s biggest payments app and its most famous convenience-store chain may be about to get closer. SoftBank and its payments arm PayPay are in talks to invest in Seven & i Holdings, the retailer behind 7-Eleven, according to Bloomberg, which reported the discussions on Friday. Neither the size nor the structure of any deal has been disclosed, and the talks may not lead anywhere.
The logic, if a deal comes together, is not hard to trace. PayPay already runs a partnership with Seven-Eleven Japan that lets shoppers link accounts and earn points across both, and a formal investment would deepen a relationship between a payments network and one of the busiest retail footprints in the country.
PayPay is no longer just an app inside SoftBank. It listed on Nasdaq in March, raising close to $880m in the largest US flotation by a Japanese company in a decade, and closed its debut valued at about $12.7bn. SoftBank still controls roughly nine-tenths of the company, so any PayPay move carries the group’s fingerprints.
The payments firm has spent the year expanding well beyond QR-code checkouts. In June it agreed to buy a controlling 70.2% stake in T&D Financial Life, pushing into insurance on top of the credit, banking and securities services it already offers to more than 74 million registered users.
