91: Derek Young, President, Japan Fidelity International

<p>Originally from the United States, Derek Young is the President of Fidelity Japan for the last 3 years. Fidelity International provides world class investment solutions and retirement expertise to institutions, individuals, and their advisors. Prior to Japan, Mr. Young was working with Fidelity and had been living in Boston, USA for 22 years. Mr. Young had visited Japan on business briefly before 5 or 6 times before shifting base to Japan 3 years ago.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p> </p> <p>In his initial days in Japan, Mr. Young started by approaching the Japanese market by examining his own strengths and weaknesses. His strengths lay within the investment space, having a deep understanding of Fidelity and having decades of investment experience. His weaknesses were in not speaking Japanese and not understanding the Japanese market. Identifying where his weaknesses were allowed him to collaborate with people that had those language skills and to take the best possible combination of strong investment knowledge, strong language skills and the best understanding of the clients to combine them for the highest probability of excellence and success for the clients.<span class= "Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p> </p> <p>Mr. Young emphasizes that modelling what works elsewhere may not necessarily work in Japan. He believes that Japan has some of the most demanding clients in the world. Strong attention to detail is ingrained in Japanese culture and that is the expectation everywhere in Japan. His team had this understanding on attention to detail and this pressure to deliver yet he had to learn this. For example, if he was wanting to increase efficiency but this increased client errors, he realized that clients could leave for that error regardless of performance in the portfolio. Thus, anything that is done to improve efficiency cannot increase the risk for client errors. The tolerance for error is significantly less in Japan compared to elsewhere in the world.<span class= "Apple-converted