Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. (MUFG; 株式会社三菱UFJフィナンシャル・グループ, Mitsubishi Yūefujei Finansharu Gurūpu) is a Japanese bank holding / financial services company headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan.

It holds assets of around US$2.5 trillion (JPY 230 trillion) as of March 2013 and is one of the main companies of the Mitsubishi Group. It is Japan's largest financial group and the world's second largest bank holding company holding around US$1.8 trillion (JPY 148 trillion) in deposits as of March 2011. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial is the second largest public company in Japan when measured by market capitalization.

Background

The company was formed on October 1, 2005 with the merger of Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group (MTFG), formerly Japan's second-largest banking conglomerate, and Osaka-based UFJ Holdings, which was Japan's fourth-largest banking group.

The core banking units of the group, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and UFJ Bank, were merged on January 1, 2006 to form The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. This integration was originally scheduled to take place on October 1, 2005, the same day that the parent companies were merged. However, pressure from Japan's Financial Services Agency, which wanted to ensure the smooth systems integration of the two banking giants, caused the merger of the banks to be postponed for three months. The trust banking and securities units of MTFG and UFJ were merged according to the original schedule on October 1, 2005.

Capital market

Capital markets are financial markets for the buying and selling of long-term debt or equity-backed securities. These markets channel the wealth of savers to those who can put it to long-term productive use, such as companies or governments making long-term investments. Capital markets are defined as markets in which money is provided for periods longer than a year. Financial regulators, such as the UK's Bank of England (BoE) or the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), oversee the capital markets in their jurisdictions to protect investors against fraud, among other duties.

Modern capital markets are almost invariably hosted on computer-based electronic trading systems; most can be accessed only by entities within the financial sector or the treasury departments of governments and corporations, but some can be accessed directly by the public. There are many thousands of such systems, most serving only small parts of the overall capital markets. Entities hosting the systems include stock exchanges, investment banks, and government departments. Physically the systems are hosted all over the world, though they tend to be concentrated in financial centres like London, New York, and Hong Kong.