For a football player, the dream could be to play in La Liga, the Premier League or Serie A, but for baseball, it will nearly always be MLB. When Tomoki Kubo wanted to challenge himself in finance, it was the major league of the Big Apple banking sector that he aimed for. Kubo’s own sporting prowess lay elsewhere, though that would lead to a career tangent and later a game with a Swiss legend.
On graduation from Keio, the Tokyoite considered joining a trading company or a bank. It could have been a Mitsubishi either way but he ended up at a forerunner of MUFG in 1988, as the Bubble was nearing its peak.
When it arose, Kubo jumped at the opportunity to do an MBA at the University of Chicago. Graduating in 1995, he headed to the gilded financial world of New York with a Mitsubishi Bank subsidiary.
The Big Apple
“Like Japanese baseball players, I wanted to be a major league player.”
Though Kubo had completed post-grad studies in English, functioning in the fast-paced environment proved a fresh test.
“On the MBA, if I didn’t understand what the teacher was saying, I could go home and look at the textbooks or check something. It’s easy to catch up, but in business you need to respond accurately right away, there’s a lot of pressure.”
Kubo met the challenge well enough to be offered a position with Morgan Stanley to return to Tokyo and work on distressed assets, a burgeoning field in the late 1990s.
The Big Mikan
With Japan’s financial institutions understandably risk-averse post-Bubble, Kubo found himself able to utilise what he’d learned on his MBA and with Mitsubishi in Japan and New York in an environment with “fewer layers of people and very quick decision making” that “created exciting opportunities.” Thriving in this challenging landscape, Kubo was promoted to managing director while still in his 30s.
After eight years with Morgan Stanley, his career took a short unexpected turn. Kubo had always been a serious tennis player, ranked top five nationally during high school, and even competing in pro tournaments at university.
Tennis and Sushi
Keio’s tennis team had hit a rough patch and Kubo was invited by a new regime to be an assistant coach. During that two-year stint, he established the Keio Challenger, which remains the only tournament on the ATP Challenger Tour hosted by a university.
Around that time, he also advised sushi chain Akindo Sushiro on its hostile takeover defence, before being headhunted in 2009 to work at the Soshi Educational Group, which had just established a university in Okayama.
“I was interested in the education industry but found it wasn’t the place for me and I wanted to go back to finance.”
Kubo was invited to be chief investment officer at Japan Industrial Solutions, a new private equity fund backed by the Development Bank of Japan and the nation’s three megabanks. There for five years, Kubo was responsible for “around 40 to 45 billion yen of investment in corporate restructuring.”
Another Change of Direction
After more than a quarter of a century in finance that included experiencing both the Japanese and internet bubbles and the global financial crisis, Kubo found himself a touch disillusioned with an industry that he says at times is “just a zero-sum game, right?”
In 2016 he joined NEC Corporation, “a big traditional company that had really gone through some struggles,” with a mandate to invest around $2 billion in global business.
The 2018 acquisition of UK-headquartered Northgate Public Services (NEC Software Solutions) a specialist in public sector software and outsourcing for approximately $620 million was followed in 2019 by the purchase of KMD, Denmark’s biggest IT firm for around $1.2 billion.
A year later, Kubo led NEC’s biggest global deal, the takeover of Swiss financial software giant Avaloq for $2.2 billion. NEC faced multiple rivals in its pursuit of Avaloq, and the Japanese firm had previously lost out on deals through not being nimble enough, according to Kubo.
“This time, we knew we had to be quick and the board agreed to hold an extraordinary board meeting, the first in 120 years.”
Having spent closer to $4 billion, he then had the considerable task of integrating the acquisitions and making the deals work. Takayuki Morita, current CEO, had been chief global officer and instrumental in bringing Kubo on board.
“Morita-san said to me two years ago, ‘Now you’ve invested so much money, you have to be responsible for the businesses you acquired.’ So, from this year I’m president of the new DGDF [Digital Government/Digital Finance] business unit. I’m very, very excited that NEC has trusted me to manage these businesses. And I really feel NEC’s need to be a global player because while is a good country Japan, growth is expected to be lower compared to other countries due to the aging population.”
He travels frequently to Europe to oversee the new additions to the NEC fold, and while on a trip visiting Avaloq in Switzerland a few years ago, was given a major sporting surprise. Knowing Kubo had been a very keen tennis player they arranged a game for him with Martina Hingis.
That may have been an unsurpassable pinnacle in tennis terms and Kubo hasn’t stepped on a court since. “I only play golf these days.”
Text: Gavin Blair for SCCIJ.
