"Nomura FX's boss went to China and bankers need to pay attention"
Hoe Lon Leng, Nomura’s global head of Linear FX based in Singapore, has just spent two weeks immersed at Tsinghua University and touring China’s corporate heartlands. His reflections are less about sightseeing and more about the lessons global bankers should not ignore.
At Huawei, he saw a company that ploughs 20% of revenues into R&D, with more than half its workforce dedicated to it. At Xiaomi, he watched robotic hypercasting machines edge out Tesla’s best, while Alibaba showed how entire ecosystems are built on loyalty, logistics and trust. Even in Huayuan Village, once among the poorest in China and now among the richest, Leng found that discipline, welfare and enterprise profits are tightly integrated.
Leng’s takeaways are consistent: discipline, scale, and execution. From professors who remind students that entrepreneurs redefine constraints, to staff at a campus who show quiet pride in service, the message is cultural as much as commercial. China builds fast, learns fast, and aligns with national priorities in a way Western firms rarely can.
For global finance, the lesson isn’t that the West is finished. It’s that China plays a different game, one where ecosystems matter more than silos, where execution outruns optimization, and where conviction, whether in AI or EVs, is backed by scale and speed.
Leng turned 50 this year and paid his own way to attend the programme. His reflections are personal, but the signal for bankers is clear: look closely at how China operates, because the next decade of global finance will be shaped by these lessons.
Andras Katipana is the pseudonym of a banker in Singapore
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
