Nikko Securities chief Masashi Kaneko has broken a long-standing taboo: He’s the first head of a big Japanese company to appear in a TV commercial. Kaneko, 61, is the only nonprofessional actor in an ad campaign touting Nikko’s “one-stop channel” service, which allows individual investors to trade or receive investment advice online or by phone. Kaneko says Nikko is trying to convey that it wants customers to make money. In Japan there’s a popular notion that brokerage firms are mainly intent on generating commissions.
Kaneko, who spent a decade of his Nikko career in international finance, is a major advocate of change. He raised eyebrows in 1998 when he welcomed an investment from U.S.-based Travelers Group, which later merged with Citicorp. A year later he was the only chief of a major Japanese securities firm to give a wholehearted welcome to the arrival of Nasdaq Japan. An advocate of foreign business practices, he says individual investors will remain wary of equities while the current government’s “ambiguous” economic policies are in effect. Kaneko acknowledges that his views set him apart from other major Japanese institutions, including Bank of Tokyo,Mitsubishi, Nikko’s biggest shareholder before the Travelers deal. “We are still a Japanese company,” he says, “but when it comes to corporate culture, we,re much closer to Citigroup than to Tokyo-Mitsubishi.”
