I have a confession to make. I used to really dislike investment banking awards events.
You’d be seated for hours on end, the room too hot, the bread rolls long gone, and the starter — a dry, fussily arranged piece of salmon — finished.
The comedian hired for the evening would be midway through a painfully unfunny routine that betrayed complete ignorance of finance. You’d look around the room: hundreds of people in black tie or evening dress, mostly in their forties and fifties, appearing simultaneously overdressed and exhausted. And then the realisation would hit. You weren’t just observing this scene. You were an integral part of it.
I attended these events for more than two decades, often convincing myself they were a waste of time.
The awards themselves can invite scepticism. Every trade publication worth its subscription — and for the record, GlobalCapital is worth several multiples of its subscription — has its own set of gongs.
There are roughly as many prizes as there are banks capable of winning them. They remind me of participation trophies given out to primary school students. “Capital Markets House of the Year” sounds impressive until you notice the categories also include things like “Most Innovative Equity-Linked Structure,” “Best Debut Eurobond for a Sustainable Issuer”, and “Regional Mid-Cap Yen-Denominated Syndicated Loan of the Year”.
At some point, the awards tell you more about the ingenuity of the editorial team than about the recipients.
I cannot recall a single client who hired us on the strength of a tombstone declaring us “ECM House of the Year”. Clients, sensibly, care more about relationships, distribution and fees than industry prizes.
Senior management rarely treated them seriously either, whatever they said publicly. You would win something, send out a congratulatory internal email, and move on. The senior bank leaders who appeared occasionally to collect trophies reminded me of a parent attending a school sports day — dutiful, feigning interest, mostly bored.
The awards dinners were one of the few remaining occasions to meet competitors and old colleagues in person, have a proper conversation, and share a laugh
And yet… and yet. As someone who largely stopped attending in the final stretch of his career, I now find myself, with the benefit of distance, missing the whole affair.
The true value of these evening was less the awards, more the room itself.
Modern banking, for all its connectivity, has become oddly solitary. You can spend months working with counterparts at rival firms on a syndicated deal and never meet them face-to-face.
Everything is a call, a screen, a Bloomberg message, an email and, latterly, a Zoom.
The awards dinners were one of the few remaining occasions to meet competitors and old colleagues in person, have a proper conversation and share a laugh.
That is rarer than it sounds, and worth more than we often admit.
The juniors sensed this instinctively, even if their seniors had forgotten it. For a second or third year analyst, being sent to one of these dinners was genuinely exciting. They met their peers at other banks, appreciated the scale of the business they had joined, and felt, briefly, part of something larger than their own desk and deal flow.
The jaded veterans at the table may have been rolling their eyes, but the 25 year old next to them was caught up in the spectacle. That mattered.
And then there were the clients who came along, particularly corporate issuers collecting their own prizes.
They were not bankers and so had not yet developed the contempt that comes with experience. They found it glamorous. They welcomed the time away from the office and the celebration of their work.
As for the venues, the food, the celebrity emcees — a mixed record, to be polite. Some evenings were genuinely brilliant; others tested the patience of even the most tolerant guest. I rarely thought the food and drink matched the price of the tables.
But I remember the hearty laughter, the spicy gossip and the camaraderie born of shared experience.
The evenings had a warmth I was perhaps too busy being cynical to appreciate at the time.
These awards ceremonies offered a human connection in an increasingly dematerialised industry.