Japan's regional banks still sit at the top of the table when borrowers ask to change loan terms, and the gap is clearest in small-business lending. In the Financial Services Agency's latest snapshot, covering 9 major banks, 97 regional banks and 77 other banks through the end of April, regional banks posted a 98.9% implementation rate on resolved requests from small and midsized enterprise borrowers. Major banks were at 96.9%, and other banks were at 91.9%.
Small businesses: high approval rates, very large regional-bank volumes
Across all 183 institutions, SME borrowers filed 394,543 applications. The FSA recorded 380,501 executed cases, 5,366 denials, 24,511 cases still under review and 7,352 withdrawals, for an overall resolved-case rate of 98.6%. Regional banks dominate the workload as well as the approval table, handling 343,887 SME applications, versus 50,329 at major banks and 327 at other banks. For business readers, the practical message is simple: the regional banking system is still where most requests are being processed, and where the highest resolved-case success rate sits.
Home loans: still mostly approved, but less smooth
Housing borrowers face a tougher set of odds. Through the end of April, the overall resolved-case rate for housing-loan requests was 93.4%. Regional banks again led at 93.9%, followed by major banks at 91.7% and other banks at 91.0%. Volumes were far smaller than for SMEs, 8,125 applications in total, but the pipeline was not trivial: 760 cases were still under review and 1,016 had been withdrawn. Household relief remains common, in other words, just less close to automatic than the SME tables might imply at first glance.
Read this as a stocktake, not a clean monthly trend
The FSA page also republishes end-March figures, and the message is stability rather than a sharp turn. In the March-end tables, major banks' SME rate was 97.1% and regional banks' was 98.8%; for housing borrowers, the overall rate was 93.5% before moving to 93.4% in the end-April table. The caveat matters: the regulator says executed, denied, pending and withdrawn counts include some applications received before March 2025, and all figures are counted on a loan-claim basis. So these tables are best read as a snapshot of where approvals remain strongest and weakest, not as a neat month-by-month pulse.