*  *  *  Introduction It is a great pleasure for me to speak at this forum about a topic, retail financial services, which is indeed of great interest to central bankers around the world. Retail financial services have just entered a new stage of development in Japan.
This is evident, for example, in the fact that an increasing number of banks are allocating substantial management resources to various areas of retail financial services. Behind this movement is a business strategy among banks to strengthen their profitability, now that the nonperforming-loan (NPL) problem has been nearly overcome.