The Tokyo Stock Exchange's next president wants to turn the bourse into one of the world's top three exchanges by 2010 by adding new financial products to draw more investors.
The world's second biggest economy lags far behind rivals in global equity trading volume, accounting for a mere 9 percent, hurt by high taxes and opaque regulation.
The Industrial Revitalisation Corp of Japan that Saito headed won sceptics over by turning around 41 heavily indebted companies such as supermarket chain Daiei Inc without losing public funds.
"The world will be made up of two or three exchanges with global scope in three years," Saito said in an interview. "I want to make Tokyo one of them."
Saito will lead the TSE as it struggles to catch up with exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange, which has more than triple the TSE's average daily turnover, as well as cosmopolitan Asian centres such as Singapore and Hong Kong.
Late to join a global scramble among exchanges to partner up, the TSE signed an agreement in January to share technology with both the NYSE Group and the London Stock Exchange.
The Tokyo bourse could consider mergers with other exchanges, including a union with Japan's commodities exchanges to expand its investment products, said Saito, who will take the helm on June 22.
"We need to offer more derivatives products; investors will not come until we can offer an attractive risk portfolio," he said.
But he side-stepped questions about any current talks of alliances or about TSE's plans to make its 2009 market debut, saying he was not yet president.
Saito, an ex-vice president at Nomura Securities, resigned in 1998 after Japan's biggest brokerage was discovered paying off extortioners to keep quiet at shareholder meetings.
After using up his severence pay to fight a class action suit by shareholders, Saito found work through an employment agency before he took the post at the IRCJ - a job nobody else wanted.
"He lost everything once; this is a man who has nothing to fear," said lawyer Shinjiro Takagi, who worked with Saito at the IRCJ as Industrial Rehabilitation Committee Chairman. "He knows how organisations work, but can press ahead with what needs to be done, because he feels no need to curry favour," Takagi said.