Bond Awards

Three factors help explain the success of S&P Global Ratings in its financial institutions business during a year in which the Covid-19 pandemic has created unique challenges for the global banking industry and a huge degree of uncertainty over its future credit performance.

What is striking about BNP Paribas’s FIG business this year is not just the volume of deals, or the landmark transactions it has worked on — and there have been plenty of those — but the diversity of issuer, product and geography.

Natixis has, for more than a decade, had a reputation as one of Europe’s leading covered bond houses. It has won awards as the best euro lead manager, and for covered bond research, while maintaining a top 10, and usually a top five position in the global covered bond league tables. “That strength, however, could turn to be a weakness, when volume in the covered bond markets declines”, says Gabriel Lévy, global head of DCM for financial institutions at Natixis in Paris.

The joined-up approach that BNP Paribas takes to corporate financing came into its own this year, allowing its debt markets teams to better navigate the volatile market and help clients first scrambling for liquidity and then to adapt to the post-crisis economy.

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.