ピーカブー (Peekaboo)

» see lawson.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2003 Japan amended its securities law so that a company which was not itself a brokerage could register with the finance bureau as an intermediary and take securities orders. Lawson, the convenience store chain, read that and saw a use for the touchscreen terminal already standing in every one of its branches. In September of that year it signed a broad tie-up with Nikko Cordial Securities, and on 30 August 2004 the two of them published a release saying the service would open the next morning.

They called it Peekaboo. The name is a pun stacked two deep: the English peek-a-boo, and peeking into the world of kabu, which is the word for a share. Kabu is also the word for a turnip, so the logo was a turnip, and the television campaign was fronted by Yoshihiko Inohara. Lawson's president at the time was Takeshi Niinami, later better known for running Suntory. The pitch in the release was aimed at people who were curious about investing but could not reach a brokerage during opening hours, or did not fancy walking into one, and the company called it an industry first: a convenient securities channel inside a convenience store.

Trading opened at five in the morning on 31 August 2004 at 112 directly-run Lawson branches in the Kanto region, and went to every store in the country on 13 September, which at the end of that July meant 7,851 of them. Loppi handled domestic shares and individual government bonds, plus a mini-lot scheme for anyone who could not afford a full trading unit. Foreign currency money market funds were available by phone or through the web version. The terminal was live from 5:00 until 2:00 the next morning, with the three dead hours given over to system maintenance.

There was nowhere for any of this to happen in Turkey. Turkey in 2004 had no network of all-night shops trusted to sit between a citizen and a regulated financial product. The retail investing counter was a bank branch open during bank hours, three years after a currency crisis that had left a lot of people uninterested in the whole subject. Peekaboo is only possible in a country where the corner shop is already infrastructure.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how you opened an account ~

You picked up a Start Guide from the rack in the store, with the application form bound into the back of it. You filled it in, enclosed a copy of your identification, and dropped the reply envelope in a postbox. If the branch had run out of guides, the Loppi terminal would order you one. Once Nikko approved you, a Nikko card in Peekaboo livery arrived in the mail, and because the Lawson ATM could move money into the account, the loop from funding to buying closed without leaving the shop.

One detail of the arrangement is worth keeping. The registered intermediary was Lawson the company, headquartered in Suita, Osaka, and not the individual store. That meant the person behind the till was legally barred from having anything to do with your Peekaboo transaction, including explaining which button to press. Every question went to a call center. A desk handled product queries from half past eight to half past five, and a separate Loppi support line ran all night.

~ why it was slow ~

The orders went out over the Loppi hardware and the Loppi line, which had been designed to print concert tickets. Response times were visibly worse than a PC trading screen, and share prices move continuously while the market is open, so research and anything resembling timing were painful on it. The fee schedule did not rescue the position. Nikko set commissions at 80 percent of its standard table for terminal and web orders, which sounds generous until you put it next to the online-only brokers taking Japanese retail flow in the mid-2000s. An account maintenance charge of 105 yen a month sat on top, waived in year one and after that only if you kept 100,000 yen on the books or traded that month.

Then the owner fell over. An accounting fraud at a Nikko Cordial group company came out in March 2005 and left the parent in trouble. Citigroup circled through 2007 and took the whole group in January 2008. New Peekaboo applications stopped at the end of that March and the terminal service finished at the end of June, with the web platform left running for anyone who still had an account. Nothing about the closure reads as a verdict on convenience store finance. It was four years old and attached to a company that had stopped existing in the shape that built it.

~ the turnip after ~

The mascot had a second career. Nikko sponsored the football club Kawasaki Frontale, and Peekaboo the turnip had been appearing at home matches next to the club's own mascot. The service died in 2008 and the turnip kept turning up for another six years. In April 2014 the club announced that Peekaboo would stop after the fan appreciation day on 14 June.

What happened on the day was not a retirement. SMBC Nikko handed the rights to the club, the costume was recolored so the leafy top went from green to pale blue, and supporters were invited to submit a new name on condition it contained the syllable kabu. On 9 August 2014 the turnip was renamed Kabrera. In April 2022 it married Takata no Yume-chan, the mascot of Rikuzentakata in Iwate, at a shopping complex in Kawasaki. A child called Mecaboo was introduced before a match against Urawa in April 2023. The brokerage lasted three years and ten months; the vegetable is still working.

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