UBS Group hired three salesmen in Japan to boost its business selling high-yielding structured investments and other tailored derivative products to local financial firms, as activity heats up in this area.
Former HSBC Holdings banker Shuhei Sanada joined the Swiss lender’s Tokyo brokerage arm on Jan 1 to lead sales for regional financial firms, according to a statement. Eiichiro Yoshida from Nissay Asset Management and Hiroaki Sato from Barclays also started at UBS Securities Japan on the same day.
“This investment in broadening our reach underlines UBS’s commitment to the Japanese market,” Naohiro Kuroda, co-head of global markets in Japan, said in an e-mailed response to Bloomberg News. The trio will help the firm “bring our ideas and capabilities to a much wider client base”, he said.
International lenders are competing in Japan to recruit bankers who have close ties with local financial institutions. They are seeking to capture demand for products including securities made of derivatives that could offer extra returns to compensate for limited lending margins. Regional banks are also looking for risk-hedging and financing solutions.
The search for talent in this market segment, which UBS calls “critical” in its statement, is intensifying. Last year saw the likes of Morgan Stanley and Societe Generale SA poaching veteran bankers from UBS and other firms to bolster their businesses.
Local Japanese banks are under increasing pressure to “reconstruct” their bond investment portfolios partly to protect against the risk of losses from rising domestic interest rates, a trend that bodes well for solutions business, said Hideyasu Ban, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. “People who can put together derivatives to propose a new bond portfolio are likely in high demand.”
Sanada led institutional sales at HSBC Japan’s client solutions group before going to UBS. Yoshida will serve as a senior sales representative in charge of managing client relationships, using his past experience heading institutional products and strategy at Nissay Asset Management, an arm of Japan’s largest insurer Nippon Life Insurance. Sato will offer cross-asset products and solutions.
The trio will help sell a range of products, from structured securities and financing solutions to instruments for insurers to hedge against the risk of big payouts in the future.
UBS’s merger with Credit Suisse helped boost the local securities unit’s ability to structure and trade such products, according to Kuroda. The bank also hired former Goldman Sachs managing director Suicheng Wang in Tokyo in June to strengthen the structuring part of that business. BLOOMBERG
