Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Ltd. (“SMBC”, President & CEO: Akihiro Fukudome) announced that SMBC has entered into a business alliance agreement ("Alliance") with Euphoria Co., Ltd. ("Euphoria", Representative Director/Co-founder: Hiroshi Hashiguchi and Makoto Miyata) to support companies' efforts in human capital management.

Euphoria provides "ONE TAP SPORTS", a sports-related data management system that supports condition and training management of many top athletes and sports teams including the Japan national team. In addition, Euphoria offers "ONE TAP SPORTS for Biz," which applies the visualization and improvement of athletes 'condition methods to the health and safety management of corporate employees.

Under demographic changes, deglobalization, and the rapid digital/AI transformation in all industries, the importance of human capital as a key driver of medium- to long-term corporate value is being increasingly recognized. Since enhancement of human capital encourages companies to respond new market changes and improve technological capabilities and brands, many companies are promoting human capital disclosure and human capital management.

In addition, as the working-age population declines and ageing workforce increases, the labor shortage is becoming an issue in Japan, such as “2024 issue” happening in labor intensive industry and one of the concerns is keeping the quality of the operation in Japan's supply chain in the future. Thus, improving employee’s productivity through human capital investment is becoming increasingly important. However, as it is not easy to measure and quantitatively analyze the return on human capital investment, companies primarily acknowledge the value of human capital investment as being in human resource development and promoting innovation.

Under these circumstances, in addition to understand and appropriately improve the physical and mental health of the employees, visualizing the financial and non-financial impact of the employee condition will not only improve employees’ productivity, but also contribute to improving the soundness and stability of Japan's supply chains, which in turn will lead to " Japan's regrowth."

Through the Alliance with Euphoria, SMBC aims to provide both financial and non-financial solutions for the visualization, analysis, and disclosure of the impact of human capital on companies, thereby contributing 1 not only to improving the sustainability of Japanese supply chains, especially in labor-intensive industries, but also to promote human capital investment by all Japanese companies to improve employee productivity. Through this alliance, we will support our customers' human capital management and promote initiatives to create a virtuous cycle of “Create Social Value”together with our customers.