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Three people familiar with the discussions said the Japanese bank wants to use Paris as an alternative banking hub for clients who want to borrow from an EU counterparty, instead of continuing to deal with Nomura’s existing Europe, Middle East and Africa hub in London.
Nomura, which employs about 2,300 people in London, has already announced that it will set up a broker dealer in Frankfurt, which it will use as its trading hub after the UK leaves the EU in March 2019.
Like other banks, Nomura is also planning to repatriate a small numbers of bankers to the EU countries that they cover, so bankers covering Spanish companies could move to Madrid and those covering Italian companies could move to Milan.
One person familiar with Nomura’s thinking said the choice of Paris for its lending hub partly reflects the fact that France had been the “most aggressive” of all EU countries in its bid to lure banks to set up post-Brexit operations there.
Senior executives at another Japanese bank told the Financial Times that over the past 18 months there had been a “constant charm offensive” from Paris, even after the bank had made it clear that it was shifting operations to another European capital.
Nomura already has a French banking licence but must get agreement from the country’s regulators on the terms for expanding the entity’s balance sheet and its plans to offset some of that risk to London and Tokyo. [...]
Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)