Japanese asset management companies that sell their funds through distributors are starting to return to the direct sales channel. Their direct sales initiatives are targeted at younger demographics such as recent college graduates, but capturing young customers is not easy. It requires customer journey mapping and micro-targeted marketing through such means as social media advertising, telephone contacts with customers and educational seminars.

Digital currencies have emerged as a hot research topic amid growing interest in digital currency issuance among central banks. We spoke with Robleh Ali, head of a digital fiat currency project at the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), about how to best design central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and how their issuance would affect the financial system.

On December 10, 2018, Nissan Motor's former chairman Carlos Ghosn, another Nissan executive and Nissan itself were indicted for allegedly violating Japan's Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA) by filing Annual Securities Reports containing misrepresentations. With the media reporting conflicting accounts and the facts of the case yet to be spelled out in detail, it is too early to safely draw any conclusions about the allegations against Ghosn and his codefendants.