It's bonus week for Nomura - and senior staff in London fear getting 'zeroed' along with their junior reports
- At Nomura, "MDs are being told their teams are getting zeroed, and the MDs are inferring that they're getting zeroed as well," a source tells Business Insider.
- Nomura is due to alert staff to bonus numbers on Thursday.
- The move comes as Nomura's London office was hit the hardest in recent cuts. The bank lost about 100 key staff, including senior managers, last month.
After a brutal month of job cuts in Nomura's London office, another blow could come due on Thursday if top staffers are alerted that many of their juniors won't be getting a bonus this year.
One source close to the matter told Business Insider that managing directors at the Japanese bank are bracing to get "doughnutted," or receive a bonus of zero, once word comes down from top managers this week.
"MDs are being told their teams are getting zeroed, and the MDs are inferring that they're getting zeroed as well," the person said.
If true it would be another blow for the beleaguered bank's employees. After the Japanese bank posted its worst results since the financial crisis in January, it has been culling jobs in flow trading, foreign exchange, and emerging markets desks in Europe and the US, and last month trimmed its Japanese retail bank branch network.
Internal slides from an executive management meeting on March 30 about the company's strategy, seen by Business Insider, outlined an "acceleration of shift" from secondary to primary, or bespoke client services. The slides also outlined a plan to shrink costs in "flow" fixed-income and a plan for "further leveraging IT and AI for improving client services and trading."
Not long after that presentation, the bank culled 103 jobs globally, with the majority of cuts coming out of the London office that included many at the MD management level.
The bank has been retreating to its Japanese roots and trimming its international division, and in 2016 shut down the bulk of its cash equities operations in Europe.
A Nomura spokesman declined to comment.
In January, Nomura reported a net loss of 101.2 billion yen ($918.9 million) for the period from April to December last year, its worst performance since 2008.