Mizuho poaches 150 fixed income staff from RBS

Mizuho Financial Group will hire about 150 fixed-income staff from the US arm of Royal Bank of Scotland in the coming days as it seeks to develop its North American business in "a really focused way".

In the past, Japanese acquirers have tended to expand aggressively in the world's biggest economy. The mid-1980s acquisition spree by Mitsubishi Estate, for example - capped by the purchase of the Rockefeller Center - became a byword for exuberance.

But Japan's second-biggest banking group by assets intends to be much steadier, according to Andrew Dewing, Mizuho's head of US corporate finance.

The Japanese bank, which announced a deal to buy $36bn of loan assets from RBS in February, is looking to focus on lending to a select band of US blue-chips, taking advantage of the steady retreat of capital-constrained rivals such as Deutsche Bank, Barclays and BNP Paribas.

"We want to invest to win and lead relationships where we can," said Mr Dewing. Taking on RBS's US and Canadian loan book, along with staff from its debt capital markets, foreign exchange and interest rates teams, will "accelerate our business [by] three or four years," he said.

Mizuho ranks 17th in the US syndicated loan market so far this year with a 1.7 per cent share of underwriting, says Bloomberg data, putting it a long way adrift of JPMorgan and Bank of America, each with 15 per cent. Adding RBS's 2.7 per cent share would lift the group to seventh, vaulting ahead of Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse in a market that saw $2.1tn of deals last year.

Mizuho's acquisition of the RBS portfolio is expected to close early this week, with about 150 staff transferring to the Japanese bank.

It comes amid a swath of cuts to overseas operations at RBS, which has posted seven back-to-back annual losses since the financial crisis. Under chief executive Ross McEwan, the bank has been sharpening its focus on UK consumer banking in a bid to return the taxpayer-owned bank to private ownership.

RBS could not be reached for comment.

In one example of Mizuho's appetite for using its balance sheet in the US, it flanked JPMorgan and Wells Fargo in supplying $45bn of bridge loans in November for Actavis to buy fellow US drugmaker Allergan.

Normally, Japanese lenders appear in big US acquisitions at a later stage - and for lower fees.

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