Nomura's traders are thankful of being let go at the best time of the year for finding new jobs

Names are starting to dribble out of Nomura following last week's redundancies at the Japanese bank in London and in Asia. No one's actually been let go yet: people have simply been put at risk while Nomura casts around looking for other things they could be doing internally. The good news, however, is that while this happens Nomura's unwanted traders are able to spend their time hanging out at home looking for something new.

"It's the perfect time of year for them to have been made redundant," says one Nomura insider of his absent colleagues. Most banks start the year with new hiring budgets and are now looking to recruit. By comparison, he says the Nomura traders who were laid off last July had a much harder time of it. One trader who left last year said he was glad to be out of Nomura and that his time at at the Japanese bank had put him off working in finance again.

Nomura made 40 to 50 people redundant last week in its global markets businesses in London, Asia and New York. Insiders in fixed income say the exits in London appear to have been far fewer than expected and included Oliver Burrows, a financials analyst, Gavin Peoples, a credit trader, and James Kalbermatter, a covered bond trader, plus an unnamed lawyer who covered distressed debt. Burrows joined Nomura in July 2017; Peoples joined in March 2016; Kalbermatter had been there since 2011.

Sending people home immediately is standard practice when you're a bank that's laying off traders. It's simply too risky to give disgruntled traders access to a large trading book. Nonetheless, traders at Deutsche Bank are complaining of being made to work their notice periods on a case-by-case basis.

Nomura declined to comment on the traders who are leaving. Headhunters in London say the bank is also expected to hire some new credit traders to work under John Gousias, who joined from Millennium last year and Francesco Cuccovillo, head of solutions and credit structuring in EMEA. However, neither man is understood to be hiring for the moment.

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