Urbane and youthful 51 year old Hironari Nozaki has decided to call an end to his extensive and well-documented career within the upper echelons of the investment banking industry in favor of a life in academia.
Mr. Hironari has spent the last 11 years at Citi, where he served as Managing Director, and is moving on in order to lecture, imparting his detailed industry knowledge to undergraduates.
I’ve been thinking about a career in academia,” Mr Nozaki stated un a report by Bloomberg Business. “If you look at the structure of financial assets in Japan, you can see that the country’s financial literacy is low. I want to help nurture people, including in finance.”
Mr Nozaki began his career following his graduation from Tokyo’s Keio University in 1986 with a batchelor’s degree in economics, when he accepted a position in the planning department of Asahi Bank.
Two years ago, he explained to Institutional Investor “One unforgettable task I had was when I had the opportunity to negotiate with the Japanese government for the injection of public funds into thebanking system during the financial crisis of 1997 to 1999.”
He was then headhunted to become an analyst, moving to ABN AMRO in 2000, and then to HSBC Securities in Japan in 2001 before joining his current employer as Managing Director in 2004.
Mr. Nozaki’s appetite for acedemic study did not stop following his first degree in the mid 1980s. He has since, alongside his corporate career, studied a master’s degree in public and private management at Yale School of Management and a PhD in policy studies at Chiba University of Commerce,
In his doctoral thesis, his work was published under the title of “Banking Policy for Enhancement of Financial Stability: Manager Characteristics, Compensation and Moral Hazard in Japanese Banks.”
Photograph courtesy of Institutional Investor