Nomura's traders are finding jobs elsewhere amidst cost cuts

Nothing lasts forever. While this sadly applies to the Easter break, it can apply equally to the bleakness of losing your job at an investment bank or to working for an investment bank that is intimating rounds of endless cost cutting. Nomura's traders have realised these truths and are finding themselves jobs elsewhere. 

Two of the Japanese bank's traders have left its offices in London and are joining rival banks. One has already joined; the other is on gardening leave.

James Kalbermatter, a former executive director and covered bond trader at Nomura, has just joined Natwest Markets in London. Idriss Amor, a structured rates trader at Nomura, is understood to have quit for a top tier American bank whose name is yet to be revealed.

The departures come after Nomura cut over 100 staff globally at the start of this month, prompting some staff there to regret being lured by the Japanese bank's generous compensation packages. Some of those cut had only recently joined, including graduate trainees hired in summer 2018.

Nomura's redundant traders have received widespread support from contacts in the market. Bilal Hafeez, Nomura's former head of G10 FX and rates strategy in EMEA who also authors a lifestyle blog wrote at the weekend that he's rethinking his approach to work and contemplating a, "big positive transformational change."

Remaining Nomura traders might want to contemplate something similarly transformational after Nomura CEO Koji Nagai told the Financial Times last week that there will be 'severe' job cuts in London and that he was "very worried" about the London office. The FT said Nomura insiders are complaining that the bank is run like a hedge fund, cutting and rebuilding businesses according to the whims of the market.

Kalbermatter spent seven and a half years at Nomura after joining from Morgan Stanley. Amor spent six years at Nomura after joining from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

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