Global Financing Guide: Pleasing the crowd

This year's survey of capital markets' users and peers shows that JP Morgan is still the overall favourite for capital raising and liability management. The bank tops 25 sections, mostly for derivatives; it is followed in the popularity stakes by Merrill Lynch, Chase and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell.

According to respondents to our borrowers' poll - mostly corporate treasurers and chief financial officers - JP Morgan provides the best service in bond syndication, private placements and risk management. It excels at dollar, yen and lira derivatives transactions. As for the bank's peers, they consider JP Morgan the most consistently innovative Eurobond house, distinguished at equities and loans too. However, they vote for Chase as the leading name for liability management.

This difference of opinion between market users and peers runs throughout the survey, where banks vote in line with league tables but corporates do not. For example, in the borrowers' poll of Eurobond houses, JP Morgan beats Merrill Lynch, which has lead-managed over $39 billion in new issues this year, compared with JP Morgan's $31 billion. For international equities, respondents put Morgan Stanley Dean Witter ahead of leading bookrunner and global co-ordinator Goldman Sachs. Chase tops the ranking for syndicated loans although league tables show Citicorp as the leading arranger of 1997.

One name to watch is ABN Amro, which improves across the board. The Dutch bank is the Eurobond peers' preferred co-manager, up to first place from 11 last year. It rises in sections covering innovation, new issue pricing, syndication and retail placement. On the equity side, joint venture ABN Amro Rothschild ranks top for privatizations and gains ground at institutional and retail penetration in western Europe. Borrowers put the bank in fourth position for syndicated loans, up 25 places on 1996. So far this year, ABN Amro has arranged just over 120 transactions totalling approximately $10.5 billion.

Looking more closely at Eurobonds, both borrowers and peers vote for the same banks in a different order. The disappearance of Nomura, HSBC and Daiwa from the borrowers' top 10 makes way for Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. SBC Warburg falls off the top slot after two years and UBS slips from equal second to eighth. UBS also drops in other areas of the survey: out of the top 10 for overall capital raising, and down in sections on Eurobonds and syndicated loans. In the Eurobond peers' poll, ABN Amro jumps from 10th to fifth place and TD Securities enters the top 10, after recent activity in the Australian and New Zealand dollar market.

Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and JP Morgan are among the success stories of the borrowers' table for international equities, up to fourth and fifth place respectively. Neither bank features in the peers' vote, however, where credit is given to Jardine Fleming and BZW.