Keith is the Chief Financial Officer for both Mitsubishi Securities USA and Mitsubishi Securities Canada. His two main roles are to manage the financial regulatory reporting of the broker dealer as well as be the chief financial liaison between North America and the headquarters in Tokyo. Find out why a job applicant’s outside interests might be the tipping point for hiring!
Transcript
My name is Keith McDermon. Graduate in 1981. BS Accounting. I am the chief financial officer of Mitsubishi Securities USA and I'm also Chief Financial Officer of Mitsubishi Securities Canada. What that means is I'm responsible for all the financial regulatory reporting that goes into supporting a US or Canadian broker dealer. Okay so what a broker dealer does is they provide capital access to customers. Through underwriting and the distribution of those securities to the general population through the sales and trading practice. And we service our clients also by providing liquidity for their portfolios when they want to buy or sell and we support them and many verse different capacities but different products. From a regulatory perspective I'm responsible for maintaining the capital liquidity of the firm at all times. What that means is that there's a certain level of regulatory capital that's required to manage the risk, i.e. the trading portfolios we maintain here at sufficient levels. In addition we need also to maintain liquidity so that we can settle our transactions with our counterparties. So those are two of the most vital things I do. However there are elements around those exercises such as financial reporting, regulatory reporting, managing of controls, etc. that are consuming most of my day and there's always something to excite me as far as a crisis or emergency to deal with, you just have to deal with it as it comes. Monday will start with just seeing what the profit loss was for the previous Friday. Seeing what our capital base is. See what our balance sheet is. Looking at our liquidity profile for the week. Knowing what our settlements will be. Also understanding the capital market's activity for the week. So I need to know the calendar of what's happening, what's gonna settle during that week and how much capital we're gonna be utilizing during that period of time. So those are the kind of things I start looking for on Monday morning. And as the week evolves deals change. Some deals get accelerated, some deals get delayed. And we just have to be monitoring those as they go through the week. There's always numerous questions from Tokyo, our parent company is a Japanese bank and they pepper us with hundreds of questions throughout the week. What's going on? Explain to us this change, etc. So, there are always very late evening calls. There'll be one tonight, for example at seven o clock, you know that I'll be asked to attend. And then also I have a monthly call at six a.m. that I have to be here in the office for. And that's late for them but it's early for me and that's always painful. So that's just part of the deal of working for an Asian company.
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