If April is the cruellest month and May is the merriest, the dog days of June are when Euromoney’s weary hacks finally lay down their pens and fold away their laptops: the Awards for Excellence are over for another year.
Established in 1992, these awards were the first of their kind in the banking industry. This year we received a record number of submissions, and we read every one of them, cover to cover and top to bottom, often many times over. The thousands of pages of documents both stimulate the brain and test the patience, but are an invaluable tool in our deliberations.
Submissions come in all shapes and sizes. Some are rich kaleidoscopes of textual tapestry; others seem to rejoice in mangling the language of Shakespeare and Joyce. One thing that never changes, however, is some banks’ enthusiasm for creative fiction.
What happens is this. The parameters we set are simple: performance in the year to the end of March. With some awards – say, for corporate responsibility – competence builds over time, so determining one bank’s pre-eminence over another is a more subjective experience.
Every year, there’s always a bank or two that likes to bend the rules a little in the hope Euromoney won’t notice
With others – take advisory or investment bank – it gets more objective. Dealogic’s data-sifting process may differ from Bloomberg’s or Refinitiv’s, but seldom by much. So, if Goldman Sachs beats Citi to the punch in China M&A or across Latin American ECM and DCM, that adds significant weight to their case.
But every year, there’s always a bank or two that likes to bend the rules a little in the hope Euromoney won’t notice.
One lender that was once far larger across the capital markets than it is now stood out as being ranked far higher than expected in one M&A ranking in the Middle East – joint first, alongside a big Wall Street firm – so we immediately checked the footnotes.
In shocking news, the bank had extended the timespan of its own data by three weeks, in the hope of sneaking a couple of extra deals in unnoticed. A second footnote cheekily added that the bank in question had chosen to exclude anything that took place in advisory-heavy Saudi Arabia, pushing it further up the table.
In another case, during a pitch meeting a big US bank was at pains to highlight its status atop the M&A league table in one significant Asian market. But added in tiny writing was a significant rider: ‘excluding special purpose acquisition companies’. Spacs might not be what they were in the capital markets, but they all count.
The awards wouldn’t be the awards without attempts to pull the wool over our eyes. We look forward to similar shenanigans in 2023.
