When Siddharth (known as “Sid”) Prasad joined Nomura’s London office in 1989 straight from the London School of Economics (LSE), his idea was to spend a couple of years gaining experience before returning to his native India. But 11 years on, despite all the turmoil that Nomura has been through, including the posting of a $6 billion loss in March 1999, Prasad is still there. In August last year he became co-head (with Seiichiro Miyaoka) of global debt primary markets, the first business at Nomura to be organized along global lines.
“I’ve had opportunities at Nomura I might not have got at other firms,” he says. A reputedly committed and hardworking individual, he talks about his job with enthusiasm and at terrific speed. “Nomura is like an unpolished jewel,” he says. “We’re a very substantial firm, yet we don’t have a high profile.
“There have been scandals and we have gone through a lot of pain. But the mere fact that we have survived shows our resilience.”
Siddharth Prasad, 34, was born in Lucknow, India. His father, a civil servant, was frequently on the move, so in order not to interrupt their schooling, Siddharth and his sister were sent at the age of five to Dehra Dun, one of India’s leading boarding schools.
When he was 15, Siddharth’s father was posted to London to become the minister for economic affairs at the Indian High Commission, and he came over too and studied for A-levels at a tutorial college in London. When his father returned to India, Prasad stayed on to read economics at the LSE.
After Siddharth graduated, his father was keen for him to go to the US to do an MBA, but he preferred to remain in London. “The compromise was that I should stay on at the LSE and do a master’s in economics,” he recalls. His tutor was Mervyn King, now the deputy governor of the Bank of England.
When Prasad left the LSE in 1989, Nomura was at its peak and was actively recruiting. He joined as a graduate recruit and spent eight months in the transaction management department. He then moved to the equities department for another eight months before helping to set up the capital markets desk in January 1991. Asked to choose between east European emerging markets and debt capital markets, he opted for the latter at a time when Nomura was consistently number one in the debt league tables. Prasad soon got a break when his boss left. “While they were hiring a replacement, they said ‘See what you can make of the job’,” he recalls. Taking over coverage of Sweden and Germany, he made rather a lot of it, soon becoming one of the bigger contributors to Nomura’s debt deal flow.
In Sweden, Nomura already had an excellent franchise, and it was a case, he recalls, of “don’t drop the ball”. In Germany, though, the bank had done very little business, and he had to resort to the phone directory to look for clients. “The great thing was there was no downside risk,” he says. “I still have clients today who I first contacted by cold calling.”
It turned out to be a very opportune time, with German public sector financials in particular beginning to issue much more debt. “The sector was very exciting to cover,” he recalls. “They had very high credit ratings and were very unexposed to the international marketplace.”
In 1995, he gave up covering Sweden and took on Austria and the Netherlands, and was soon lead-managing a succession of high-profile deals from those countries. Between October 1998 and January 1999 he lead-managed three consecutive sovereign issues for Austria. In the meantime, his continuing relationship with several Swedish clients continued to bear fruit. Earlier this year, Nomura lead-managed SBAB’s e1 billion deal, Sweden’s biggest ever residential securitization.
In March 1999, Prasad was made co-head of capital markets (outside Asia) and in March 2000 became co-head of syndicate and capital markets outside Japan. He took over in his present position when Nomura globalized the business last August.
“The template we are looking at is similar to that of the American investment banks,” he says, “with the business organized along product lines, rather than geographically.” He adds: “The primary debt business has been very important to Nomura historically. Even during the difficult years, we never pulled back from the international markets. The low point was probably 1998, since when we’ve gone through radical restructuring. Right now we’re rebuilding. We hope to be in a position to compete with the bulge bracket firms within five years.”
