Awards for Excellence 2019
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The best bank for financing in Latin America is JPMorgan. The bank’s pedigree in debt and structured products isn’t news to anyone who works in investment banking, but in recent years the breadth of its offer has been enhanced by increased depth in client and product coverage.
When Lisandro Miguens, head of Latin America debt capital markets for JPMorgan and based in New York, was charged with leading the bank’s debt financing in the region at the end of 2014, he immediately set the bank on a course of diversifying away from the plain vanilla international debt transactions and into what he classifies as “nontraditional/structured financing”.
The bank targeted project finance, illiquid credits, private placements, rating advisory and restructuring. These sit alongside and complement the bank’s traditional set of debt products.
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Lisandro Miguens |
“We used to have 100% of the business comprised of loans and syndicated loans, as well as bonds and some plain vanilla asset liability management transactions,” says Miguens.
“Our revenue streams in 2016, 2017 and 2018 have been the highest for JPMorgan in the history of Latin American DCM, despite much lower wallet coming from the traditional bond and loan markets.”
That strategy has paid off handsomely in the last year, with the bank leading on 36 international DCM transactions with a combined value of $9 billion.
The bank is active across all the market segments, including opening the market this year in January with a $1.25 billion deal for Uruguay, local currency deals such as a the $3.06 billion equivalent for the Republic of Peru, liability management deals (Costa Rica’s part-tender for its 2021 bond in March), as well as deals for quasi-sovereigns (Codelco’s $1.3 billion in January), high yield issues (Digicel’s $600 billion bond in March), and a host of high-grade corporates, financial institutions and multilateral agencies.
