Nomura bankers learning to live with Western-style culture of bonus awards
STAFF at Japanese brokerage Nomura are warming to a Western-style pay structure that places more weight on bonuses, its chief executive Kenichi Watanabe said yesterday.
Watanabe said more than half of the firm’s 1,600 investment bankers had signed up to contracts similar to those that existed at the Lehman Brothers operations Nomura bought last autumn.
The new contracts will see employees’ basic rate of pay slashed and make them easier to sack, in return for potentially lucrative performance-related bonus awards.
Nomura has embarked on a drive to expand into Europe, recruiting more than 500 bankers in Europe since the beginning of the year.
But despite European efforts to curb the bonus culture, Nomura is moving in the opposite direction, potentially giving it an advantage in recruiting the best talent.
Watanabe also said the firm would be profitable in 2009, despite falling to a record 709bn yen (£4.5bn) loss last year as a result of hefty writedowns and costs associated with the Lehman purchase.