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Fusion of Blocks and Investment Experience Monex Securities and Viling

For the first time, Villing is a non-financial industry company in the group.

Let us unlock cross-industry synergy, collaboration and event details.

Since 2017, Monex Securities has been part of the Kids’ Workshop, a summer program for children organized by the Mori Building. In 2022, the event was once again held at Roppongi Hills as an in-person event, after two years of being online in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

We thought hard on how we can offer a better, more powerful program in 2022 than before the pandemic to mark the revival of the in-person event. After several planning meetings, it occurred to us that we actually have a company within our Group capable of offering workshops for children, Viling, an education provider. We should be able to collaborate for this event, but at first, we had little idea how money and education could be bridged.

We reached out to Viling colleagues and explained the purpose of the event. Asked whether it was possible to make a bespoke program based on Viling’s existing offerings combining money-related elements, Kazuaki Nakamura, President of the company, was very positive; ”Why not? I will propose something!”

A month later, we received a proposal based on Viling’s existing workshop offering called “Let’s make Pythagoras Device.” In this bespoke scheme, children are asked to make presentations to investors (i.e. staff playing investor roles) on how they can build a better device with extra parts and win over investors to invest in their vision (i.e. purchasing the parts they are looking for). What an attractive idea!

With our offering fixed, we opened sign-ups for participation on the Kids’ Workshop website and received a massive number of applications. According to Mori Building, our program was by far the most popular among all offerings in 2022. Participating children, who were very lucky to win the competitive lottery, understood how the program works and showed amazing negotiation skills. We heard them trying hard to gain staff’s buy-in for what they planned to build, for example, “this is what I would like to build and that is why I need this pulley.” The final products? Incredibly high quality Pythagoras Devices!

As the program had an overwhelmingly positive reception, we asked Viling to offer the same program at Monex Group’s Family Day for children of our employees. Viling, the first non-finance company joining Monex Group, made an impression within the Group through this event.

We decided to offer the same but enhanced program in the summer of 2023. This time, the device to build was Leisure Land. In this upgraded program, children received some up-front money to buy a certain number of parts, but needed to talk to investors if they wanted to have more, or better, parts. They needed to increase their money on hand through money invested to cover the cost for extra parts. The new scheme allowed children to experience what it is to receive investments in a more direct manner. With unlimited imagination of the participants, the program was another success.

Finance literacy and education are two sides of the same coin in attaining one of our corporate purposes, “optimizing the balance sheet of life.” This collaboration truly demonstrated how Monex Group companies can work together towards this shared goal.