Japanese banking giant Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) plans to hire more senior bankers in London as its newly appointed head of corporate banking for the UK, Ireland and the Nordics looks to expand the business.
Holly Villiers told City A.M. she has been appointed to the new role to try to boost business with existing clients as well as hiring bankers across its operating divisions.
“The role has been introduced to gear up for that next phase of growth, and how we manage that,” Villiers said.
Major hires
MUFG will be recruiting “selectively” across a broad range of sectors as it tries to position itself as “strategic partner and advisor” to its large clients across multinational operations. The bank has completed a string of major hires over the past two years from large European, British, and US banks.
“We still see a lot of potential: we’re not working with every client in the region yet,” said Villiers. “We still see a lot of room to grow.”
MUFG is the fourth biggest bank in the world by assets, according to Global Finance magazine. The British, Irish, and Nordic operations currently account for around 30 per cent of revenues from MUFG’s Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) business.
Villiers will report to Sebastien Rozes, EMEA head of corporate banking. Villiers has worked at MUFG for six years, after holding senior roles at Royal Bank of Scotland and ABN Amro.
London as post-Brexit hub
London, in which MUFG predecessors have had a presence for over 140 years, will remain the headquarters for the venerable Japanese bank in Europe after Brexit.
MUFG currently plans to move less than 100 bankers out of London, out of an overall presence of more than 2,000, mostly based in its Ropemaker Street offices.
While Brexit threatens to cause serious problems for some banks in the UK servicing clients in Europe, it will have a much smaller effect on MUFG, which will be able to continue servicing EU clients from its offices on the European mainland.
The commitment to the UK market from the bank’s Tokyo leadership has been “loud and clear”, Villiers said.
She said: “It’s our biggest market in EMEA. It’s a very mature market for us. We still see a lot of growth so the commitment to the UK is incredibly strong for us.”
Clients have responded with a “business as usual” attitude since the Brexit vote, Villiers added. “We haven’t seen people delaying strategic decision making and so on because of the external environment.”
M&A pipeline and Asian growth
Villiers sees a strong pipeline for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity over the coming year.
MUFG is seeing “fewer but larger, lumpier deals”, Villiers said, using the depth of its balance sheet to “put very large tickets into play”, such as the 2016 mega-merger of Anheuser-Busch Inbev and SAB Miller, on which MUFG was the lead bank.
“That balance sheet depth is becoming more and more critical for M&A,” Villiers said.
The bank continues to see a strong growth area in Asia, in China as well as in South-East Asian nations, many of which are deregulating some sectors of their economies.
Villiers plans to emphasise MUFG’s geographical spread in an effort to gain more business with existing clients particularly as they expand to new growth markets like Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
“For us it is all about the international reach and it is all about following our clients where they need us,” she said.
