The chief executive of Japanese bank Nomura has apologised and taken a voluntary pay cut after one of the bank’s former wealth management employees was charged with attempting to murder and rob customers.
“I would like to offer my deepest apologies to the victims and the many people involved for the great inconvenience and concern that have been caused,” said Kentaro Okuda, who will take a three-month pay cut of 30 per cent.
“This incident is something that should never have happened for a financial institution that handles important assets and whose customers trust us with their transactions,” Okuda said at a press conference on Tuesday in Tokyo. Nine senior managers, including the bank’s head of wealth management, also took voluntary pay cuts.
The apology comes after one of the bank’s former wealth management employees was charged with attempted murder, robbery and arson after allegedly drugging an elderly couple and setting their house on fire in an attempt to steal millions of yen in cash.
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The couple, customers of the bank in Hiroshima, survived the attempt, which took place in July. The former Nomura employee was charged last month.
The bank said in a statement on Tuesday that the “former employee joined Nomura Securities as a new graduate in April 2018″ and from April 2022 “provided asset management advice to individual and corporate clients at the Hiroshima Branch Office”. He was dismissed on August 4.
The bank also unveiled a series of measures designed to reassure customers after the violence, including strengthening supervision of visits to clients’ homes, revision of employee evaluations, and heightened monitoring and enforced periods of absence for wealth management employees.
“For the foreseeable future, a manager will accompany employees when they visit clients’ homes or speak to clients over the phone around the time of each visit,” the bank said in a statement.
Nomura is working to expand its wealth management business, a strategic priority as it tries to reduce its reliance on volatile trading revenue. The bank and brokerage is preparing to capitalise on an expected transfer of Japanese household wealth from cash and deposits into higher-yielding investments as the country returns to a period of sustained inflation.
Nomura, like other Japanese financial institutions, relies on salespeople to visit customers’ homes in order to drive and sell business.
People familiar with the matter said there had been a very limited number of account closures due to the home visit scandal.
It is not the first voluntary pay cut that Okuda has agreed to this year as scandals have threatened to overshadow strong results, including its highest quarterly profit in four years in the quarter ending in September.
Okuda, along with other top executives, agreed to a voluntary, two-month 20 per cent pay cut after the bank was fined ¥21.8mn ($143,000) by Japan’s banking regulator over the manipulation of government bond futures. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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