Awards

It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a single event that has changed the financial outlook for so many companies as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic. Corporates, investors and other capital markets participants raced to grasp the implications, putting ratings agencies in the spotlight.

BNP Paribas is no stranger to winning the bank award for Central and Eastern Europe, but this year it has added its first Africa award to its haul. A closely integrated approach that sees the emerging markets team working closely with BNP Paribas’s broader credit businesses — whether that is leveraged finance, the high yield and investment grade debt markets and the growth markets — has been crucial to success, says Fred Zorzi, global head of primary markets.

S&P Global Ratings reorganised its emerging markets effort at the end of 2019, setting up a specialist group that brought together its most senior analysts and economists in 16 countries that it defined as emerging markets across Asia Pacific, EMEA and Latin America.

It’s fair to say that 2020 has been a difficult year for many issuers to navigate, but at First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), head of group funding Rula AlQadi could afford to be sanguine when the markets closed down in the early stages of the Covid pandemic.

NatWest Markets, part of NatWest Group, has achieved dominant overall market share in sterling for financial institutions, while its breadth of activity has given it a leading role in more complex products that require closer engagement with the buy-side, such as acquisition finance, Libor transition and innovative liability management exercises.

A combination of local presence and global knowledge has long helped Santander Corporate & Investment Banking keep a leading position in Latin America debt capital markets — where it has been in the top five for many years. Santander is now focused on filling out its platform in more of the region’s countries, while its global strengths in environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters and project and infrastructure finance are helping it deliver for the new challenges its clients are facing.

MarketAxess has long been at the forefront of the evolution in emerging markets bond trading and is now spearheading the next changes in the globalisation of the business. Its Open Trading architecture is connecting ever more participants and cutting trading costs, its automated trading innovations are freeing up traders for to do more valuable work, and its roll out of a request-for-market protocol is fundamentally changing market structure across all markets.

GlobalCapital is delighted to announce the winners of its Bond Awards 2020.

GlobalCapital has held its Bond Awards every year for the past 12 years — but never like this. For the first time, we are revealing the winners in a virtual ceremony in September rather than at our London awards dinner in May.

GlobalCapital Asia is pleased to invite pitches for our annual capital markets and investment banking awards, which recognise the most impressive transactions and investment banks of 2020.

Tradeweb is the winner of this GlobalCapital’s OTC trading venue of the year award in what has been an extraordinary time for electronic trading. During the stressed market conditions of spring, Tradeweb stayed committed to innovating and creating efficiencies for its clients, which made it a clear winner of this category. While this award recognises Tradeweb’s achievements in derivatives, its presence in Treasuries, mortgages and exchange traded fund markets should be noted too, especially as much of its recent work has focussed on creating efficiencies across these product lines.

GlobalCapital is delighted to announce the winners of its 2020 Global Derivatives Awards.