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The story
Mitsubishi UFJ Bank has announced “Emmet Excellent Club,” a membership program for wealthy clients built around a ¥30 million deposit balance, which will let qualifying members get an Amex Platinum card for free starting in March 2027. On the forum, comments ranged from “¥30 million is a low bar for a ‘wealthy’ program” and “isn’t this just a rehash of the service Mizuho scrapped five years ago?” to a split debate over whether Amex Platinum itself is even worth having.
Mitsubishi UFJ Bank has announced “Emmet Excellent Club,” a membership program for wealthy clients centered on customers’ deposit balances, launching in March 2027. The bank also announced a digital inheritance platform, “Emmet Souzoku” (“Emmet Inheritance”), set to launch in the second half of fiscal 2026, expanding the reach of “Emmet,” which is billed as covering customers for their entire lives.
“Emmet” launched in June 2025 as a new financial services brand representing a major overhaul of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s (MUFG) retail services. Its defining feature is that services are planned and developed across group companies’ domains — cards, trusts, securities, and more.
Since Emmet launched, activity across areas like bank account openings, card issuance, and brokerage account openings has grown significantly year-over-year, with Tadashi Yamamoto, MUFG Executive Managing Officer and Head of the Retail & Digital Business Group / Group CDTO, describing it as “a strong foundation for the next stage of evolution.”
Source: watch.impress.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Bank-affiliated cards have traditionally been aimed at the self-employed and business owners — this is similar thinking.
As for people on a regular salary—
Well, I don't actually know the real figure, but within the deposit range you can spend freely.
If the balance runs low, they'll ask you to top it up.
Even I've got that much, and I'm 27 and graduated from a bottom-tier university ("F-rank").
Only if you've deposited it with the MUFG group, though.
Isn't the main target here Mitsubishi group employees and retirees?
If you use SBI, Sumitomo Mitsui's "Olive" service has started something similar, so you could just go with that instead.
I wonder if Rakuten has anything comparable.
So Mitsubishi UFJ is just ripping that off and starting it up again?
Premium banking perks for big depositors kept getting axed one after another as deposit rates fell — and now that rates are rising, the banks are all bringing them back?
Big depositors are profitable for the bank not just by parking money, but by taking out loans to build a house or start a business.
But during the low-rate era, they did absolutely nothing.
Once the economy improved and rates rose, they started borrowing again (for condo investment purposes).
Make a Mastercard Platinum instead.
Professor Piketty already said that's just how the world works.
The gap only narrows during wars and major disasters.
The BOJ's quantitative easing under Abenomics, and the pandemic-era handouts for households exempt from resident tax, were both policies that hugely benefited people who already had assets.
If you actually wanted to fix inequality, cutting income tax is the only way — but Japan has just kept effectively raising income taxes instead.
Maybe they've got a huge stash of other assets too.
If they're leaving that much in liquid assets alone, there's probably around 10x that behind it.
Every one of them runs preferential treatment and campaigns, but they're all way too lame.
I'd want to use Yahoo or Rakuten cards for everyday spending, and Amex Platinum just for airport lounges.
Airport lounges are kind of a joke — all you get for free is udon or soba.
ATMs let you deposit up to 100 coins a day fee-free, so I walk over there every single day — doubles as exercise.
There's stuff like credits if you stay at hotels costing ¥500,000+, but none of it feels appealing at all.
If you don't regularly use high-end hotels and restaurants or travel often, the card has zero value for you — so it feels like most Japanese people just aren't the target audience.
Not much different from the Saison Amex Platinum.
Real connoisseurs go for the karaage (fried chicken) and curry.
Seriously?
What an incredible perk.
It's all-you-can-eat!
Too much vegetable oil and you'll get cancer.
Go with sushi instead.
It wouldn't make sense to put money you're actively moving in and out of into a brokerage account either.
This is the kind of story aimed at that type of wealthy person — nothing to do with vanity.
A free one like the one in this article is fine, but with the regular annual fee being so high, it feels like the only people who'd actually get their money's worth are business people constantly flying overseas.
People who pay the full annual fee for Platinum probably aren't thinking about "getting their money's worth" in the first place.
Background and Key Points
Mitsubishi UFJ’s “Emmet” push follows a broader pattern among Japan’s megabanks: after nearly three decades of near-zero interest rates, deposits were a cost center, and the perks-for-balance model that once existed (Mizuho ran an Amex Platinum-for-deposit scheme until scrapping it five years ago, as poster 8 notes) fell out of favor. The Bank of Japan’s move away from negative rates and toward gradual tightening since 2024 has made large deposit balances profitable again, giving banks reason to court big depositors with free premium cards, and rivals like Sumitomo Mitsui’s “Olive” are doing similar things. For readers unfamiliar with the card itself, Amex Platinum in Japan normally carries an annual fee upward of ¥165,000 and is positioned as a lifestyle/travel card (lounge access, hotel credits) rather than a cash-back product, which is why its value depends heavily on whether a holder actually travels or dines at the high end.
The thread’s real disagreement isn’t about MUFG’s strategy so much as whether ¥30 million even qualifies someone as “wealthy” in 2026 Japan, and separately whether Platinum’s benefits (airport lounge snacks, hotel credits) justify carrying the card at all — two distinct arguments that got tangled together.
What’s likely to be missed by outside readers is that “wealthy client” programs at Japanese banks have historically been built around deposit balances rather than income or net worth, unlike Western private-banking tiers that scrutinize investable assets broadly; a large chunk of a Japanese household’s wealth can sit outside the banking system entirely (real estate, life insurance, postal savings), so a ¥30 million bank balance threshold says less about actual wealth than it appears to.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Business News+) thread “[Credit Cards] Mitsubishi UFJ Makes Amex Platinum Free at a ¥30 Million Balance — “Emmet” Wealthy-Client Strategy.”
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