Awards for Excellence 2018
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Big and clever, that is what you needed to be to be a leader in the financing business in the last 12 months, and no one achieved that combination better in the region than Bank of America Merrill Lynch, North America’s best bank for financing.
The bank, under head of global CIB Christian Meissner, topped the US debt capital markets league table for the period, according to Dealogic, but that product strength hardly tells the full story. It is a leader in investment-grade syndicated loans, private placements and is doing more IPOs and convertible bonds than in the recent past. But what captures the breadth of the bank’s platform is its roster of complex strategic financings.
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Christian Meissner |
And where better to start than with its work for CVS Health? Not only was it joint lead arranger and joint bookrunner on the $49 billion senior unsecured bridge backing the roughly $77 billion pending acquisition of Aetna – the biggest bridge in the period – but it followed that up with a $5 billion term loan, active books and B&D on a $40 billion senior bond this year, which was the third-largest investment-grade bond ever. There are franchises that can move quickly, are product-agnostic and able to juggle multiple markets. But none could match BAML’s ability to do this and commit financing in the scale required for the biggest situations.
That juggling came to the fore in its work for AT&T, where it was active bookrunner for the issuer’s $33 billion-equivalent dollar, euro and sterling deals in the middle of 2017, supporting the acquisition of Time Warner. BAML took AT&T to meet European accounts ahead of the deals.
The bank also scored some notable highlights in bringing clients in the other direction, to the dollar market – not least its active bookrunner role on the $17.25 billion yankee from British American Tobacco that formed part of the acquisition financing for the remaining 58% of Reynolds American. The deal was the biggest UK corporate yankee ever.
Smaller, but no less remarkable, was BAML’s work with Teva Pharmaceutical of Israel, which completed a $4.5 billion high-yield bond in dollars and euros – the first time the company has issued since falling out of investment grade. The deal was a testament to the firm’s high-yield platform as well as its local coverage of the client.
