Koichi Miyata, the president of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., said the lender will hire more foreign managers for its overseas operations, tapping their local expertise to aid a global expansion.
"It's natural to see locally hired foreign managers becoming the majority in a few years," Miyata, 61, said in an interview in Tokyo on Dec. 19. "We can't just take our Japanese brains there like we've been doing for a long time."
The push by Japan's second-largest bank to draw on foreign thinking underscores efforts by some of the nation's biggest companies to become more outward-looking. Rakuten Inc., the owner of messaging service Viber, adopted English as its main language of business in 2010, while Nissan Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. make most of their vehicles abroad.