Awards for Excellence 2017
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This year’s award for best bank for markets in CEE goes to Wood & Co, the region’s leading independent investment bank. Founded in Prague in 1991, the firm has since expanded to cover the whole of emerging Europe.
Much of this expansion has come in the last seven years as Wood & Co has stepped in to fill the void created by global banks retreating from emerging markets. In 2010, the bank included Russia and Turkey in its coverage countries and mostly recently added Greece to the list.
This broad coverage means that Wood & Co is able to combine in-depth local knowledge with a broad regional footprint. It can also provide single-point access to an often complex region, a service increasingly valued by global emerging market funds (Gems).
Gems are not Wood & Co’s only clients, however. The bank also serves a growing regional investor base from its offices in Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest and Bratislava, as well as traditional dedicated CEE funds and institutional investors from around the world through its bases in London and Milan.
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Vladimir Jaroš, |
Wood & Co, under CEO Vladimir Jaroš, has the largest dedicated equity sales team in CEE, as well as 15 analysts in its award-winning research team. In total, the firm covers close to 200 companies in 15 countries, including small-cap stocks as well as liquid blue chips.
The last two years have also seen Wood & Co expand on the brokerage side with the addition of fixed income to a suite of products that already included repos, spot FX, money market products and fund placements, as well as equities and equity derivatives.
The firm also offers access to non-listed investment opportunities in CEE via equity structured products. These cover frontier markets such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, as well as pre-IPO companies.
Wood & Co’s sales and research expertise is backed by cutting-edge technology. The bank is the leading provider in CEE of electronic access for both direct market and algorithmic trading via the Woodstock front-end trading screen, which provides live market data, instant news feed and access to research.
