Finance
Nomura to boost rates and FX trading units, sees more market volatility
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on October 1, 2025
3 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on October 1, 2025
3 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Nomura is expanding its interest rate and FX trading units globally, anticipating increased market volatility. New leadership and strategic hires are part of this initiative.
By Anton Bridge and Miho Uranaka
TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan's Nomura Holdings plans to beef up its interest rate and currency trading operations globally, believing increased market volatility will lift demand, a senior executive said.
The push reflects growing doubts around the longevity of the current equities bull run. When markets become more volatile, interest rate and foreign exchange products typically perform better, as clients hedge risk and rebalance their positions, generating higher trading flows.
"Global equity markets are at all-time highs. U.S. markets - and within U.S. markets, a narrow set of stocks - have dominated as drivers of value," Christopher Willcox, the head of the firm's wholesale division, told Reuters in an interview.
"You would be wise to assume that can't go on forever and that at some point, there's an adjustment," he said.
Nomura declined to provide details on how much hiring would take place or current staff numbers for those operations.
NEW HIRES
But he noted that the group appointed a new head of U.S. rates in August - Moritz Westhoff, formerly of Bank of America - and a new co-head of its FX and emerging markets business, David Leigh, who joined from Deutsche Bank last November.
More personnel and capital will be directed to those teams, said Willcox, a former JP Morgan Asset Management CEO who joined Nomura in 2021 and became head of wholesale a year later.
Nomura's interest rate and exchange rate operations form the bulk of its macro products business, which has made up around 30% of the wholesale division's revenue in recent years. In the past business year, the division's revenue topped 1 trillion yen ($6.8 billion).
The push also reflects Nomura's efforts to build more diverse sources of income, given that its wholesale unit's performance has seen wild swings along with market conditions in the past.
"We view the macro business as counter-cyclical. In the global financial crisis, it was everyone's rates business that made all the money at the time when their securitised products businesses were shut down," Willcox said.
The securitisation of mortgage debt into financial instruments was among the core causes of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.
Willcox also said Nomura's advisory business is likely to perform better in the second half of the year compared to the first half, as the public listing market in the U.S. has picked up and there is pent-up M&A demand in Japan.
Deals and capital raisings had been held back by uncertainty caused by U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, though this has eased somewhat with the signing of some trade agreements between the U.S. and other countries.
The wholesale division does not have planned any major acquisitions along the lines of Nomura's $1.8 billion purchase of Macquarie's U.S. and European public asset management businesses. But it is looking to diversify its business lines in areas where Nomura has existing expertise to make money regardless of market ups and downs.
Earlier in September, it launched a U.S. commercial real estate platform with a team hired from Barclays, which Willcox expects will contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to the top line over the next few years.
"We're asking where logically we can extend pre-existing expertise into new zones," Willcox said.
"And there's lots of them, it's not like we're running out of things to do."
($1 = 147.9700 yen)
(Reporting by Anton Bridge and Miho Uranaka; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
Foreign exchange, or forex, refers to the global marketplace for trading national currencies against one another. It is the largest financial market in the world, where currencies are bought and sold.
Interest rates are the amount charged by lenders to borrowers for the use of money, expressed as a percentage of the principal. They can influence economic activity and consumer spending.
A financial crisis is a situation in which the value of financial institutions or assets drops significantly. It can lead to widespread economic disruption, affecting markets and economies globally.
Macro products are financial instruments that are influenced by macroeconomic factors, such as interest rates and currency fluctuations. They are often used for hedging and risk management.
A trading platform is software that allows investors to buy and sell financial securities, such as stocks, bonds, and currencies. It provides tools for analysis, order execution, and account management.
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