SoftBank and PayPay Said to Be in Talks to Invest in Seven & i
SoftBank and its payments arm PayPay are in talks to invest in Seven & i Holdings, the retailer behind 7-Eleven, according to Bloomberg.
A tie-up would bind Japan’s dominant payments app to the owner of 7-Eleven, at a moment when both are remaking themselves.
July 10, 2026 – 10:31 am
Image by: AFP/Getty Images
The logic behind a potential deal is straightforward. PayPay already partners with Seven-Eleven Japan, allowing shoppers to link accounts and earn points across both platforms. An investment would deepen this relationship between a payments network and one of Japan’s busiest retail chains.
PayPay, having listed on Nasdaq in March, raised close to $880 million in the largest US flotation by a Japanese company in a decade. SoftBank still controls roughly nine-tenths of the company, making any move highly significant.
This year, PayPay has expanded beyond QR code checkouts, acquiring a controlling 70.2% stake in T&D Financial Life and entering the insurance sector.
Seven & i, meanwhile, is in the midst of a restructuring phase after fending off a takeover attempt from Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard. It has been selling assets and reorganizing, including spinning off its former supermarket unit to Bain Capital under a new holding company.
An outside investment from SoftBank would provide Seven & i with capital and direct access to tens of millions of paying customers. For SoftBank, this represents a shift towards physical retail and everyday consumer spending, a rare bet for the usually AI-focused investor Masayoshi Son.
Son has described SoftBank’s current strategy as "total offense mode," characterized by aggressive capital deployment across sectors while emphasizing the validity of the AI boom. A payments-plus-retail combination offers an attractive opportunity: convenience stores generate massive volumes of small, frequent transactions, ideal for a payments company looking to establish dominance and stickiness.
Seven & i operates more than 20,000 7-Eleven stores in Japan alone, with tens of thousands more internationally.