Cody McGrath 
Nomura wants to set up a crypto subsidiary outside of Japan and hire about 100 people to work in the digital asset space.
Nomura, which is Japan’s biggest investment bank, is going to start a new subsidiary company to help institutional clients invest in cryptocurrency and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
People who know Nomura’s plans told the Financial Times on Tuesday that the company will combine several crypto services into a single company with about 100 employees by 2023.
Nomura is one of Japan’s ten biggest banks. As of the first quarter of 2022, it was in charge of $569 billion in assets.
Nikkei Asia, a Japanese news source, said that the subsidiary company will be set up outside of Japan. However, the board will be made up of former Nomura employees while the company hires people with expertise in Web3 and blockchain. At first, Jez Mohideen, who is the head of wholesale digital operations at Nomura, will be in charge of it.
The bank seems to be feeling more and more pressure to learn more about blockchain technology and the growing digital asset industry. One executive at Nomura told the Financial Times, “If we don’t do this, it will be harder for us to be competitive in the future.”
Nomura’s plan to offer more crypto services comes at an interesting time. Last week, the bank started letting Asian clients trade Bitcoin derivatives. Trades are done on a platform run by CME Group. On May 16, 6,944 Bitcoin futures contracts were traded on this platform.
Also, the prices of all cryptocurrencies have gone down since last week’s big sell-offs, which were caused by panic over the crash of the Terra platform.
Nomura now has to deal with the possibility that it will lose most of its quarterly profits because of a $345 million writedown on a transaction that took place during the 2008 economic downturn. This was also reported by the FT on Tuesday. The bank hasn’t said what kind of deal it was. A writedown is when the value of a deal or asset goes down.