Two former traders at Japan’s biggest brokerage and investment bank who have left their jobs earlier this year are joining rival banks, per an Efinancialcareers report.
Idriss Amor, a former structured rates trader at Nomura, has been installed on Bank of America’s emerging markets rates trading desk, nearly four months after he left his previous employer.
In addition, Nomura’s former head of financial trading, James Wilson, has just landed at JPMorgan to head its investment-grade credit trading.
Nearly 25 traders have been let go over the last few months, and Nomura Holdings CEO said hundreds of its bankers might leave or move across continental Europe as part of its $1 billion program of cost-cutting and restructuring announced earlier in April.
A raft of departures from FX team
Nomura said earlier it would cut $1 billion in costs from its wholesale business and shut more than 30 of its 156 domestic retail branches. As part of this plans, the company has already announced it will fire nearly 100 workers at its troubled European business and signaled that more were on the way as it aims to reduce costs at across its EMEA region by 50 percent.
Since then, Nomura has seen a raft of departures from its FX team to rivals over the past few months, most notably to US investment banks. This included State Street bringing in Nomura’s Harry Xu as a vice-president for foreign Exchange (Forex ) in Asia.
New York-based arm of Nomura Holdings has recently finalized an agreement to pay US authorities $26.5 million to settle claims that its traders misled investors with mortgage bonds.
The SEC said that an investigation found that Nomura traders and salespeople tricked the bank’s customers into overpaying for mortgage bonds by lying about the price it paid to acquire the securities. They also misled clients about Nomura’s profit on their potential trades, and who currently owned the securities, “with traders often pretending that they were still negotiating with a third-party seller when Nomura had, in fact, already bought a security,” the agency said.
