Koji Fusa

Koji Fusa
Born	(1959-08-10) August 10, 1959 Japan・Hyogo
Citizenship	Japan
Education	Waseda University
Occupations	Entrepreneur Philanthropist Professor Investment Banker, M&A Advisor Author Investor
Years active	1986-present
Title	GVE Ltd. CEO Special Strategic Advisor, Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford Former Professor, Cyber Security Innovation Centre, Aston University Former Executive Committee Member, Ecma International Member of the Board of Benefactors, Christ Church, Oxford, University of Oxford
Spouse	married (1992-present)
Children	4
Awards	Medal with Dark Blue Ribbon, Medals of Honour (2001) New Japan Fund of the Year by Asia Hedge (2005) Ecma Recognition Award (2022)

Koji Fusa (房 広治, August 10, 1959) is a Japanese financial expert, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist based in the United Kingdom who has been active in various countries since 2004.

Personality Overview

Koji Fusa is a co-founder of GVE Ltd., a company established in Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan in 2017. Susumu Kusakabe, a former Sony engineer who developed the first Near-field communication (NFC) smart card OS is also one of co-founders.

Kusakabe’s first NFC OS is called FeliCa OS. Kusakabe and Fusa went to the same secondary school and university. GVE has become Japan’s first decacorn in 2025, surpassing the market capitalization of $10 billion with less than 10 employees. Fusa runs GVE out of the UK where he moved with his family in the early 2000s.

Fusa has been the Special Strategic Advisor of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford since 2016.

Fusa was a professor at the Cyber Security Innovation Centre of Aston University between 2021 and 2024 which was founded during the Covid-19 pandemic by the British government and the University. Aston University was named the Guardian's University of the Year in 2020.

Fusa was an Executive Committee Member of Ecma International (an international standard setting organization for IT, based in Geneva) in 2021, and received the Ecma Recognition Award in June 2022.

Inspired by the Giving Pledge where Bill Gates and Warren Buffett announced they will donate 99% of their wealth to charity, Fusa is known as a philanthropist who is a member of the Christ Church Board of Benefactors at Oxford University. Fusa is a named donator at Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University (the oldest museum in the UK).

History

Fusa took the engineering undergraduate degree at the School of Science and Engineering at Waseda University in 1982 and chose the UK for further studies.

1982 - 1990

In 1986, Professor Richard Portes recommended Fusa to his friend at then a British investment bank in London. This resulted in Fusa started his career out of London, becoming the first Japanese M&A banker based in Europe. Fusa's first year as an M&A banker coincided with the beginning of Japanese asset price bubble. During this period, Noboru Goto of Tokyu and Seiji Tsutsumi of Saison Group was introduced to Fusa. Fusa returned to Japan in 1990.

1990 - 2003

Japan has modernized the public takeover regulations in 1990. S.G. Warburg Group (now UBS) closed the first takeover of the majority interest of a Japanese public company for a non-Japanese client in 1991. Fusa represented TI Group (now Smiths Group since the 2000 acquisition) as a buyer. Taro Kaneko, then Chairman of Marusan Securities represented for Dover Japan (renamed to Japan Marine Technologies), a public company and Japan's largest manufacturer of ship seals as the seller which is currently owned by Finnish Wärtsilä.

Since Swiss Bank Corporations (now UBS) acquisition of S.G. Warburg & Co. in 1995, Fusa was promoted very quickly. Fusa was instrumental for non-Japanese investment banks to become dominant in the areas of mergers & acquisitions and equity underwriting businesses, two of the main business of the investment banking activities.  The SBC Warburg (now UBS) team led by Fusa has took the number one position in investment banking fees for Japan in 1997 as a non-Japanese investment bank. The investment banking team jointly led by Fusa was less than one tenth of top Japanese securities houses then. When the new UBS Group was formed in 1998, he was appointed Chairman and CEO of UBS Trust Bank, becoming the top Japanese member within the entire UBS Group.

Fusa became active in philanthropic activities around this time when Japanese business people and entrepreneurs were not visible for their philanthropic activities from the Western’s point of view.

In 2000, he signed up a multi-year contract to restructure and rebuild then failed Credit Suisse First Boston (now UBS) investment banking business. Credit Suisse Financial Products, a sister company to Credit Suisse First Boston was involved in a scandal in 1999. Globally renounced head-hunter for financial industry hired by Credit Suisse advised then-CEO Allen Wheat that Fusa was the only Japanese person capable of saving and rebuilding the deteriorated brand image of Credit Suisse First Boston. During Fusa’s tenure, Credit Suisse First Boston had a collection of high profile American bankers. Fusa not only assumed the head of investment banking for Japan, but became the only resident board member of DLJ Direct SFG (or Rakuten Securities). DLJ Direct SFG became number two online broker in Japan and was a joint venture with SMBC. Hector Sants who later became the director general of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK was also a non-resident director of DLJ Direct SFG.

2003 - Current

Fusa moved with his family to the UK for their children’s primary education in 2003. Fusa together with Seabright received $100 million anchor investment from the MAN Group for their alternative investment fund. Their fund started in February 2005. Their fund returned the best result out of Japanese equities, during 2005 and was awarded the Fund of the Year by the Asia Hedge.

During the credit crisis, at the request of then the largest investor to their fund, Queensland Investment Corporation, Fusa returned the money to all investors. Fusa shifted his alternative investment to more illiquid and more risky investment. Not only did Fusa make investments into private equity deals, but also started to invest at incubation stages. In 2016, Prof. Georg A Holländer, a leading immunologist and Head of the Paediatrics Department at the University of Oxford and University of Basel, asked Fusa for his advice for a fund raising strategy to create the Institute for Developmental and Regenerative Medicine.

Fusa became the Special Strategic Advisor of the Paediatrics Department. Prof. Holländer has become the first Global Advisory Board Member for GVE as he gave Fusa the idea that GVE's real-time gross settlement platform would also be an ideal electronic health record platform. This is because GVE's OS satisfies the level of privacy protection required by the GDPR. Since the Oxford Vaccine Group (the world’s largest vaccine trial platform) is within the Paediatrics Department, Fusa joined the phase three trial of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial as a volunteer. This experience made Fusa realise that the high cost manual work for masking data could be done automatically using GVE OS while maintaining the highest standard of privacy and integrity. In 2020, Aston University (named the university of the year by the UK's Guardian) established a Cybersecurity Innovation Centre inside of its business school partly with government funding. Fusa became the first speaker at the Aston University Business School's "Leadership Stories" seminars in February 2021. Fusa assumed a professor for the Centre following three years.

Personality, Episode and Views

• The following episode illustrates Fusa’s risk return calculation and risk calculating approaches. As the anchor investor has already committed money for Fusa to start his own hedge fund, he cannot afford to fail the investment management examination. Fusa decided to take the exam from two accreditation bodies: Chartered Institute for Securities Institute and the UK Society of Investment Professionals (now CFA Society of the UK). Fusa passed both examinations on 7 and 13 October 2004 respectively.
• Fusa made his first private equity investment at the end of March 2011 just after the Tohoku Earthquake (Great East Japan earthquake). This investment has yielded over 13x return in less than three years.
• A forex technology company (Emcom) Fusa acquired in 2006 became the largest independent forex technology company within one year, even though it only handled the USD/JPY with three Japanese brokers as clients.

Vaccination

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxford Vaccine Group, a part of the Paediatrics Department of Oxford University (in which he is a Special Strategic Advisor of) called for participants for the Phase 3 clinical trials for the development of the vaccination. Since the corona virus has been transmitted from animals to humans three times (SAR, MERS & COVID-19) in the past 30 years with around 10 year intervals, experts in Oxford are predicting a fourth transmission from an animal to human is likely to occur in the future. Fusa agrees that developing and getting vaccinated is fundamental in suppressing pandemics, but also believes that vaccinations cannot be forced to everyone in the world as the adverse reactions has caused death to several people. This is the reason why GVE is involved with the development of the vaccine passport. WHO Digital Clearinghouse has selected GVE and included in their catalogue.

Ski Accident

Fusa was hospitalised after he was paralysed from a skiing accident in the Spring of 2017. Although doctors told Fusa he may need wheelchair for the rest of his life, Fusa made a miraculous recovery. Fusa mentioned in an interview with Mentalist DaiGo on his video streaming service D-Lab, that he asked the hospital to double the amount of his rehabilitation programme. At the first night of his rehabilitation, Fusa realised that the combination of Kusakabe’s secure FeliCa OS and Fusa’s forex technology could make an efficient cross-border payment system.

Author

• Dictionary of Advanced Finance Terms
• The Truth about Felica: A case study showing Sony's success in developing technology, but failure in business
• Digital Money Wars

Lecture and Presentation

• March 2003: Haas School, University of California, "Who controls the capital markets hosted by Dean Laura Tyson and Professor Richard Portes
• January 2007: Columbia Business School, on Activist Investment
• October 2008: London Business School, on Credit Crisis, Lehman and lessons from Japan in 1997
• May 2009: London Business School, Value investment during the turbulence in the US, Europe and Japan
• April 2010: London Business School, Asian Forum, on Private Equity into Japan
• November 2011: Hong Kong University MBA, Investment into frontier markets versus matured countries
• June 2012: Asian Society's Asian Forum, on Aung San Suu Kyi – Lady of No Fear (Guest commentator for the documentary by Anne Gyrithe Boone, with Peter Carey and Professor Ian Holiday)
• 2014: Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIRAsian) 2014 guest panelist on the investment banking
• 8 October 2021: Speaker at Arab CBDC & Cross-border Payment conference. He was awarded as the best speaker for the event.
• September 2019: PrimeTime News
• March 7, 2023: High-level economic seminar commemorating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and Vietnam, DX panel discussion
• May 2023: 212th ATM meeting, Lecturer: GVE Koji Fusa, CEO

Footnotes

• Fusa, Koji; Tokuoka, Koichiro. Digital Money Wars. Forest 2545 Shinsyo; 144. Forest Publishing. ISBN 9784866808123.