Japan Post Bank replaces PE head

Japan Post Bank has appointed Hideya Sadanaga, former head of product development at Nissay Asset Management as its new head of private equity. He was also previously general manager of global product at Nissay, and a manager at Nippon Life Insurance Company.

Sadanaga replaces Tokihiko Shimizu who has moved to a newly created division focused on real estate investing, according to a press release on the bank’s Japanese website.

Shimizu was appointed to the private equity role in October to look for opportunities and higher returns in the asset class.

Before joining Japan Post, Shimizu was at the Ministry of Health and Welfare where he led the Government Pension Investment Fund's (GPIF) drive to diversify its allocation of money into alternative assets including private equity and property.

Headquartered in Tokyo and now the largest publicly owned bank in the world, Japan Post has approximately 234 branches and 24,000 post offices. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in November and has since been in the spotlight after its president Masatsugu Nagato said it would consider investing in infrastructure, private equity funds and overseas real estate investment trusts, as reported by Private Equity International.

Ahead of the listing, the bank hired Masatsugu Nagato from Citigroup to serve as its president in May 2015, and shortly after hired former Goldman Sachs executive Katsunori Sago as head of asset management at its banking unit as it reallocates its portfolio.

At 30 September 2015 the bank had around ¥ 205 trillion ($1.7 trillion; €1.6 billion) in assets under management, with almost half of it in Japan government bonds.

According to Willis Towers Watson’s latest yearly Global Pension Assets study, Japan held on to its ranking as home of the world’s second largest pool of defined-benefit pensions in 2015 when its assets in the category reached $2.6 trillion.

Japan Post will give a keynote speech at the upcoming PEI Global Investor Summit in Tokyo, Japan. For more details, please visit https://www.privateequityinternational.com/global-investor-forum/.