Takeo Sumino, chief operating officer of Nomura Holding America Inc, wants to make one thing clear: neither he nor his Tokyo colleagues are into the habit of breaking into song first thing in the morning at the office.

A Wall Street Journal story in July said that one group of Nomura traders sang a company song in morning meetings.

“Japan created the video game, Japan has created the karaoke culture, but that does not necessarily mean that Nomura as a company will ask people to sing a song every day,” he said, trying to debunk reports of culture clashes between Nomura bankers and their new colleagues at the former Lehman Brothers empire in Asia and Europe.

“I worked in Nomura for 22 years. I never sang a song in the morning,” he said. “If you want to sing a song or listen to my song I can take you to karaoke, but you don’t need to come to my office because I don’t sing a song.”

Sumino acknowledges that the Lehman deal has changed things at Nomura, but insists it's been in positive ways.

Bankers who could only communicate in Japanese are now rattling off e-mails and water cooler conversations in English, he told the Reuters Global Finance Summit.

“I do think a very big transition, a transformational change took place in Nomura after we started working with Lehman,” Sumino said.

“E-mail traffic in English . . . . is tremendously larger,” he said. “The number of individuals in Tokyo who used to be able to operate only speaking in Japanese, a lot of them are now communicating and writing and speaking in English.”

It's a puzzle M&A bankers and corporate executives have been trying to solve for years: how far from your home market can an acquisition take place and ultimately stumble over cultural differences? It's a question that looms large as quintessentially Italian automaker Fiat prepares to swallow up Chrysler -- inventor of the K-car and the minivan -- and which reportedly haunts St Louis-based employees of Anheuser Busch in the aftermath of their company's takeover by the penny pinching Belgians and Brazilians at InBev.

Gary Katz, CEO of Deutsche Boerse unit International Securities Exchange, insisted during his appearance at the Reuters Exchanges and Trading Summit that all has been sweetness and light since the Germans assumed control of the upstart American options exchange and that there has been "nearly zero turnover" since the takeover.

But Thomas Kloet, Chief Executive of Canadian exchange powerhouse TMX, was one of several executives at the summit who insisted that cross border mergers can often be a recipe for disaster and that the ideal mergers are "domestic roll-ups" like CME Group's takeover of Nymex and the Chicago Board of Trade or indeed TSX Group's takeover of the Montreal Exchange, which created TMX.

Implicitly criticizing some of the first-ever cross border deals in the sector like NYSE's merger with Euronext, Kloet said: "there are significant regulatory differences that make cross border mergers pretty difficult to do, especially when they start passing over salt water, so to speak."

Listen to the attached recording to hear the former ABN AMRO senior managing director's ruminations on exchange M&A in full.

It's hard enough for fund firms to get investors to put money into markets when stocks are so volatile, but it seems they're also still having to wrestle with the bad publicity from U.S. financier Bernard Madoff's giant fraud.

Ashraf Mohamed, portfolio manager and head of Islamic funds at investment firm Stanlib in South Africa, told the London leg of the Reuters Islamic Banking and Finance Summit that investors are still nervous of another Madoff.

"All they are doing right now is saying we want to make sure there isn't any risk. One comment is 'let's make sure we don't have another Bernie Madoff situation'," Mohamed said.

However, he doesn't seem too worried about a repeat of the massive Ponzi scheme.

"My take is that it's all hit the fan," he said. "You don't need to concern yourself with assets being inflated (or) with people trying to deceive you because that's come and gone."

Hedge funds are ready to set records this year, but not necessarily the good kind.

“The bubble has popped and there is going to be a lot of pain,” said Bradley Alford, the founder of hedge fund advisory firm Alpha Capital Management. “There will be a massive reassessment of where money should go.”

Many investors expect the $1.8 trillion industry’s estimated 10,000 funds to be winnowed down by a few thousand in a few years. Funds that oversaw nearly $4 billion in assets have already closed their doors in the first quarter of 2008.

Amid the turbulence, top executives in Singapore, Hong Kong, London and New York are taking part in the Reuters Hedge Funds and Private Equity Summit this week.

Speakers include:

• Michael Travaglini, Executive Director, Massachusetts State Pension Fund
• Bruce Richards, President and CEO, Marathon Asset Management
• Rep. Richard Baker, President and CEO, Managed Funds Association
• Jane Buchan, CEO, Pacific Alternative Asset Management
• Peter Fitzsimmons, Co-President, AlixPartners
• David Balin, Head of Alternative Investments, Bank of America
• Tanya Beder, Chairman, SBCC Group; former CEO, Citigroup’s Tribeca Global Management LLC
• Mark Epley, Head of Financial Sponsors Group, Deutsche Bank
• Patrick Egan, CEO, Attalus Capital Management

A few of the stories so far:

• Hedge funds suffering painful start to year
• Hedge fund deleveraging over for now: HSBC Halbis
• KGR weighs new fund, offering to boost assets
• 3i ramps up team to support growth in Asia

(Photo: A performer runs inside a bubble during Uzbekistan’s Independence Day celebrations)