It seems as if every market downturn is accompanied by the arrival on Wall Street of a foreign bank looking to make inroads into U.S. investment banking. It was during the recession of the late 1970s, that Credit Suisse first formed a joint venture with First Boston Corp. And in the early 2000s, Switzerland's UBS and Germany's Deutsche Bank AG both went on major Wall Street hiring binges.

Now it's Nomura Holdings Inc.'s turn. The Japanese bank is planning to expand its U.S. investment bank from 10 at the start of 2010 to more than 100 people by year's end, mostly in New York. Leading the effort is Glenn Schiffman, 40, who moved from Hong Kong to New York in February when he was named head of investment banking for the Americas. Schiffman joined Nomura through its acquisition of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s Asian and European businesses in 2008. He had been with Lehman since 1991, starting in New York and moving to Hong Kong in 2007.

Nomura, Schiffman says, seeks to expand in the natural resources, financial services, industrial products, consumer products, technology and media sectors. And it has made some high-profile hires. This month, it poached Jim DeNaut and Mike Hill from Deutsche Bank to co-head its natural resources effort, and Mark Epley, also from Deutsche, as global co-head, with London-based Saba Nazar, of the financial sponsors group.

In May, Nomura tapped Simon Western for its financial institutions group and in April, Sasson Darwish, for technology. Both joined from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Of course, gaining a toehold on Wall Street is no easy feat -- a fact that is not lost on Nomura. In the 1990s, the firm had a flourishing proprietary trading and real estate finance business in the U.S., but suffered huge losses after the Russian debt default of 1998. To enter U.S. investment banking, other foreign banks, including Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, have found it necessary to acquire existing firms.

But Nomura is concentrating on an organic expansion in the U.S., says Schiffman, although he concedes that buying Lehman's European unit has helped the firm there. Nomura advised Spain's Grifols SA on its $3.4 billion acquisition of Talecris Biotherapeutics Holdings Corp., announced June 7. "The Lehman acquisition did in one fell swoop allow us to pick up a terrific business in Europe and Asia that would have taken many years to build," he says. -- Vipal Monga