Yosuke Tsuji

Representative Director, President and Group CEO Money Forward, Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Yosuke Tsuji founded Money Forward in 2012 and has run it ever since as Representative Director, President and Group CEO. The company began with a consumer proposition — an app that aggregates a person’s bank, card and brokerage accounts into one view so that they can see where their money actually goes — and then built a second, larger business underneath it, selling cloud accounting, payroll and back-office SaaS to Japanese companies. Both halves follow from the same observation Tsuji made while working at the online brokerage Monex: that Japanese individuals had gained access to sophisticated financial instruments at low cost, but not to the financial literacy needed to use them, and that the resulting anxiety was a solvable product problem. Money Forward listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market in September 2017 and now trades on the Prime market, reporting roughly 40.3bn yen of revenue and around 2,900 employees for the year ended November 2024. Tsuji has also taken on a public role in Japan’s startup ecosystem, serving as Vice Chairperson of Keizai Doyukai and chairing its Startup Promotion General Committee.

Career Highlights

• Founded Money Forward in 2012 and has led it continuously as Representative Director, President and Group CEO.
• Took the company public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market on 29 September 2017; it now trades on TSE Prime under code 3994.
• Grew the group to roughly 40.3bn yen of revenue and around 2,900 employees for the financial year ended November 2024, with Q1 FY2026 net sales of 14.67bn yen, up 25.3 per cent year on year.
• Built two businesses in parallel — the consumer app Money Forward ME, with around 17 million users, and Money Forward Cloud, the back-office SaaS suite used by more than 400,000 businesses.
• Money Forward received the Special Commendation Prize of the Selection Committee at the 4th Japan Venture Awards in February 2018; Tsuji himself was recognised at the Japan Venture Awards in 2014.
• Serves as Vice Chairperson of Keizai Doyukai, the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, and chairs its Startup Promotion General Committee.
• Sits on the executive committee of the Silicon Valley Japan Platform and serves as an executive officer of the Japan Association of New Economy.
• Began his career in accounting at Sony in 2001 before moving to Monex in 2004.

Professional Journey

Tsuji was born in 1976 in Ikeda, Osaka, and graduated from Kyoto University’s Faculty of Agriculture in 2001 — an unusual starting point for a fintech founder, and one he has never made much of. He joined Sony that year and worked in accounting, handling the finances of divisions including the AIBO robotics business. In 2004 he moved to Monex Securities, initially on secondment from Sony, transferring there permanently in 2007. Monex was one of the companies that had made online trading cheap and accessible to Japanese retail investors, and the eight years Tsuji spent in and around it shaped his diagnosis of the market: the instruments and the tools had democratised, but ordinary people’s understanding of their own finances had not moved at all.

He took an MBA at Wharton, completing it in 2011. Plans formed in that period were disrupted by the financial crisis and its aftermath, and he has said he concluded that not starting a company was the outcome he would regret. He founded Money Forward in 2012.

The first product, Money Forward ME, was a personal financial management app that connected to a user’s banks, cards and brokerages and presented a single consolidated picture. It grew to roughly 17 million users. The more consequential move was the second one: turning the same account-aggregation and categorisation machinery towards businesses, and building Money Forward Cloud, a suite covering accounting, invoicing, payroll and expenses for small and mid-sized Japanese companies. That business now serves more than 400,000 businesses and is what makes Money Forward a SaaS company rather than a consumer app company.

Money Forward listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market on 29 September 2017, in an offering that was among the more closely watched Japanese fintech debuts of that year, and subsequently moved up to the exchange’s top tier. The company has continued to grow revenue at a rate in the mid-twenties per cent while running close to break-even at the operating line, a deliberate posture of reinvestment rather than margin extraction. Recent reporting attributes growth to expanded AI features, price revisions and a strengthened sales organisation, with improving average revenue per corporate account.

Alongside running the company, Tsuji has taken on a role in the institutional argument for Japanese entrepreneurship. He is Vice Chairperson of Keizai Doyukai, the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, and chairs its Startup Promotion General Committee, and he sits on the executive committee of the Silicon Valley Japan Platform and serves as an executive officer of the Japan Association of New Economy. He also writes publicly in Japanese on the Note platform about what running the company has actually been like, including its failures.

Education

Kyoto University

Bachelor of Science, Faculty of Agriculture, graduated 2001

Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

MBA, completed 2011