The role of the banks was high on the agenda at Euromoney's 10th annual Global Borrowers & Investors Forum, held this week in London. One panel touched on the danger of bank disintermediation in the age of the e-bond. But Frank Czichowski, senior vice president at KfW, who spoke on the panel, was skeptical. He says: "To be brutally honest my life has not been made any different by the internet. We started with great hopes but the enormous potential of the net has not been unlocked." Michael Weston, head of debt capital markets Europe at Morgan Stanley, defended the banks' position. He says: "The whole market and indeed the world got ahead of itself. The internet is certainly not going to replace the sales team. I know that issuers want the human touch and do not want coverage from just a terminal." More than half of the participating delegates also agreed in a vote that small infrequent issuers in the market are ignored by the banking world. But the talk unveiled further bad news for banks when 18% of the audience declared that investment bankers were of no use at all to issuers, with 28% feeling that they were of slight use. Bankers were very useful according to 43% and 11% said they were incredibly useful.
June 22, 2001
