Success Stories

BMO Japan Securities Ltd (“BMO Japan”) is located in Chiyoda-Ku, Tokyo and registered as a Type 1 Financial Instruments Business Operator as of June 27, 2022. It is part of our global markets business within BMO Capital Markets. We have started to act as an intermediary for the sales and purchase of securities and dealing in private placement of securities.

Target clients of BMO Japan are Japanese financial institutions which include major banks, regional banks, governmental financial institutions, insurance companies, asset management companies, pension funds (professional financial institutions only) and securities companies.

At BMO Financial Group (“BMO”), we pride ourselves on being client obsessed and understanding the needs of our clients. We had been previously servicing Japanese clients primarily from our trading floor in Hong Kong. With our new Japan office, we are now able to engage with our clients more frequently and form much deeper relationships. Our expanded physical presence also shows our long-term commitment to this market.

In early 2020, we established a representative office in Tokyo to confirm our strategic plan and pave the way for the establishment of BMO Japan Securities Ltd.

In addition to BMO Global Markets' traditional broad coverage across Canadian securities, FX and Metals & Mining, we have more recently expanded the range of our fixed income product suite in areas such as US rates and securitized products, where we see a natural fit for BMO to offer best in class solutions to meet the investment needs of local institutional clients.

Japan is such a large, stable, innovative, global financial center with a wealth of talented professionals that the question internally really became “Why aren't we in Japan?”.

It was very beneficial for us to be able to submit key application documents in English, such as our information summary, registration papers, and policies and procedures. As many of our corporate support teams and key stakeholders are based in overseas locations, our main channel of communication is in English. This significantly shortened the registration process by removing the need to translate all documents from English to Japanese and vice versa.

The support we received from the Financial Market Entry Office has been invaluable. The team of experienced professionals took us through the application process and helped us clearly understand the relevant rules and regulations that the regulators expected us to follow when setting up the business in Japan.

Under this initiative by the Financial Market Entry Office, BMO Japan was also able to submit membership application documents in English to the Japan Securities Dealers Association and the Japan Investment Protection Fund, again reducing the amount of translation work. We understood that the membership applications for these organizations were processed smoothly, and we believe it was due to the excellent coordination efforts by the Financial Market Entry Office.

Although we were able to submit key application documents in English, the language barrier remained as a key challenge during the setup process. Because Japan was a new market for many of our internal stakeholders in other locations of BMO, we spent much of our time and effort to thoroughly understand the local regulatory requirements and technical requirements needed to setup the business.

Many documents still required translation from Japanese to English and vice versa, such as when setting up our physical office space and when liaising with vendors.

There was tremendous teamwork across continents and across functional areas within BMO to support the expansion in Japan. We will continue to rely on our strong culture as we continue to build on this experience for the future.

While our Japan business started as a small team with minimum hiring, our BMO global team of Hong Kong, London, Toronto, etc. has supported us through the establishment of the company to completion of Type 1 Financial Instrument Business registration, which we believe reflects the result of our strong team work.

We are also interested in hiring more people here in coming years.

Our immediate goal is to publicize our presence here and ensure we complete local onboarding with our long-term clients. We are keen to connect on a much deeper level with our existing and prospective clients as soon as it is feasible.

As a leading North American-based financial services provider, our task is to deliver the fullest capabilities of our firm to clients in Japan, connecting them to the best product expertise and liquidity globally.

Within fixed income we offer a Follow-the-Sun model, which is BMO's commitment to give all our clients access to superb liquidity, no matter where they reside and no matter what time they trade with us. We want our clients in Japan to have the same quality of pricing as they would see in New York or Toronto time. We believe that an increase in the number of companies that act as a trader for U.S. or Canadian bonds in Japan will give Japanese investors greater choice and advantages in terms of price and other factors.

We also hope to be hosting some exciting client events in the near future. Going forward we anticipate expanding our local product offering further by listening to clients, and to better understand how we can deepen our relationships with them.

Our Purpose at BMO is ultimately to “Boldly Grow the Good in business and life”. We're excited to apply these principles in Japan and hope to drive progress for our colleagues, clients, and the communities in which we work.