Second Association of Regional Banks (Dai-ni Chigin-kyō / 第二地方銀行協会)

TL;DR

Dai-ni Chigin-kyō (第二地銀協) is the industry body for Japan’s second-tier regional banks — the lineage of former mutual savings banks (相互銀行 / sogō ginkō) that converted to ordinary commercial banks under the 1989-1992 reorganization. Membership is now around the high-30s after decades of consolidation. Like its peers, it is a general incorporated association, not a regulator, and sits beside Zenginkyō and Zenchūgin-kyō in the bank industry-body stack.

Wiki route

This entry sits under financial-regulators INDEX. Read it with Regional Banks Association of Japan for the first-tier lineage, Japanese Bankers Association for cross-industry coordination, and Zenshin-kyō for the shinkin co-operative banking adjacent track. Statutory backdrop sits at INDEX and bank-license-and-baas-boundary; failure-resolution backstop is Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan; the wider operator universe is in INDEX.

Legal route / statutory position (法令の根拠)

Dai-ni Chigin-kyō is a general incorporated association (一般社団法人) whose members are banks licensed under the Banking Act.¹ The association itself has no statutory rulemaking power — FSA supervision under the Banking Act sets the binding regulatory perimeter,² and authorized FIEA self-regulatory associations are listed separately by FSA.³ Dai-ni Chigin-kyō’s effective authority is membership-contractual: model rules, joint operational standards, training pipelines, and shared infrastructure that members opt into.

Historically the body was the Federation of Mutual Savings Banks (全国相互銀行協会). When mutual savings banks converted to ordinary banks (普通銀行転換) starting 1989, the federation re-launched as the Second Association of Regional Banks to keep the converted entities together as a distinct industry constituency from the older first-tier regional banks of Zenchūgin-kyō.

Function / scope

The association’s published outline groups its work into:¹

Policy advocacy — joint positions on banking-law amendments, tax policy, capital regulation, accounting, and disclosure rules in concert with JBA and Zenchūgin-kyō where positions align, separately where second-tier issues differ.
Common operational infrastructure — shared computer-system cooperatives, payment / clearing standards plugged into Zengin-Net (operated under the Zenginkyō umbrella), joint AML/CFT and customer-protection model frameworks.
Member services — training, benchmarking surveys, model templates for branch operations and credit-administration processes, and joint procurement initiatives.
Public communication — the dainichiginkyo.or.jp portal, statistics on member banks, and joint statements on regional revitalization and SME finance themes.

The association also coordinates with the Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan on member-bank failure-resolution pre-positioning (data quality, contact-bank designation, system-readiness drills) where applicable.

Membership / governance

Membership is restricted to second-tier regional banks (former 相互銀行 lineage and any newer entrants that joined the second-tier track).⁴ Members documented in this vault include — among others — Howa Bank, Taiko Bank, Shimane Bank, Saga Kyoei Bank, Saikyo Bank, Shizuoka Chuo Bank, Chiba Kogyo Bank, Aichi Bank, Daito Bank, Sendai Bank, Miyazaki Taiyo Bank, and Shimizu Bank. The active member list shrinks over time through mergers (most recent decade-scale mergers have moved former second-regional banks into first-tier holding structures or into broader regional groupings such as Aichi FG and Jimoto Holdings).

Governance follows general-incorporated-association rules: rotating chair from senior executives of major members, standing committees mirroring the structure of JBA and Zenchūgin-kyō.

In the regional-banking lane, Dai-ni Chigin-kyō is the second of two parallel umbrellas alongside Zenchūgin-kyō. Cross-industry coordination on payments, AML/CFT, ADR, and statistical-reporting standards is shared with JBA. The co-operative banking lane (shinkin and shinkumi) sits with Zenshin-kyō and the credit-cooperative central body. Other verticals: JSDA for securities, Life Insurance Association of Japan and General Insurance Association of Japan for insurance, Trust Companies Association of Japan for trust business.

On the entity side, member-bank pages already in this vault include the second-regional anchors above plus the broader banking index.

Why this page matters

The distinction between “first-tier” and “second-tier” regional banks is a recurring footnote in JapanFG entries (capital strength, deposit base, prefectural concentration, consolidation pressure). Dai-ni Chigin-kyō is the public marker of the second-tier track and the practical surface for the consolidation narrative — a steadily shrinking membership reflects the wave of regional-bank M&A driven by demographic decline and the BOJ low-rate era. Linking back here clarifies which umbrella a member bank actually belongs to, and provides a single anchor when an entry refers to “second-regional bank standard” rules or joint statements.

Sources

[!info] Confidence note confidence: likely. Lineage from the former mutual-bank federation, membership perimeter, and function buckets sourced from the association’s own outline and member-list pages plus FSA Banking Act supervisory framework, checked 2026-05-24. Live member count should be re-verified from the official member-list page before quoting.

第二地方銀行協会「協会について」, https://www.dainichiginkyo.or.jp/about/ ↩ ↩²
FSA, “主要行等向けの総合的な監督指針”, https://www.fsa.go.jp/common/law/guide/bank/ ↩
FSA, “免許・許可・登録等を受けている事業者一覧”, https://www.fsa.go.jp/menkyo/menkyo.html ↩
第二地方銀行協会「会員一覧」, https://www.dainichiginkyo.or.jp/member/ ↩