Investment Banking in Japan : how open is it to the foreigners?
I'm Korean and I'm in my late 20s. I speak Korean, English, and Japanese. So I'm trilingual and hope to find an IB job in Japan after I graduate MBA there.
I graduated from University of Toronto in 2014, went to serve in the Korean army for two years, and was employed by the biggest commercial bank in Korea.
I worked at a branch as a junior loan officer and my primary role was credit analysis, company research, etc. for two years. I just quit the job and I'm entering Kyoto University MBA next april. Also I'm working on my CFA exam. SO MY RESUME WILL BE SOMETHING LIKE : University of Toronto(BA) + Kyoto University(MBA) + CFA lv.3 candidate + 2+ years of corporate banking in Korea + language skills(trilingual)
After all, I want to get into an American/European IB or HF in Japan. But I wonder how open the Japanese financial market is to foreigners. My Japanese is not perfect, but I'm sure i can make a business-level Japanese until I graduate from Kyoto MBA. If there's anyone here who knows about the Japanese market and tell me what I should add up to achieve my goal, please reply. Thank you.
Difficult to break into IB in Japan if you don't speak the language at native level.
I have seen a few cases of non-Japanese people working at bulge brackets in Japan, but in all those cases their Japanese were perfect (either they are half/half or spent most of their schooling years in Japan).
If for some reason you really want to break into banking in Japan, one possible way is to join Hong Kong and seek internal transfer at some point, but even this is quite difficult because the Japanese office is insulated from rest of APAC (i.e. they do their own stuff, with minimal interaction with the industry teams sitting in HK/SG).
From what I sense HF will be a totally different question but can't really comment much there given I haven't worked in HF.
I know s&t at some banks has been known to hire foreigners (even with not 100% perfect Japanese) but you’d need to be at native speaker level for IB
Hey just out of curioisity, would these positions be referring to Equities? Or do they also hire for FICC? Also, may I kindly ask which firms have the record of hiring such foreigners?
idk about finance in Japan, but you would be an excellent profile to go on Terrace House
how does that comment above not get flagged and removed? Mods need to clean this up!
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