Nomura has persuaded half of its jobs-for-life Japanese investment bankers to give up their local contracts and adopt more volatile western deals, in the mould of the Lehman Brothers operations it acquired last autumn. Kenichi Watanabe, Nomura’s chief executive for just over a year, told the FT that “more than 50 per cent” of the 1,600 investment bank staff in Japan had filled out registration forms for Lehman-style contracts that would cut their basic pay and make them easier to sack, in exchange for potentially higher performance-related bonuses.