Awards for Excellence 2020
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This year the region’s best investment bank is JPMorgan. In a highly competitive year, the US bank claims the award because of the unrivalled breadth of its mandates across investment banking products, as well as its dominance in many of the region’s countries.
Importantly JPMorgan can point to credibility beyond volume: the bank demonstrated leadership and innovation across many of the standout deals in Latin America.
According to Martin Marron, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Latin America and Canada, and head of investment banking and private banking for Latin America, this combination of breadth and depth is due to the bank’s ability to “optimize the benefits of capillarity and execution expertise for the benefits of our clients.”
It is clearly working, and it is a difficult barrier to break for the competition, because the combination of geographical presence with the full spectrum of product capability is an expensive strategy to replicate inorganically.
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Martin Marron |
Many of the investment banks that have tried to grow across the region through ambitious office openings and team hires have found this out to their cost when disappointing growth – due either to internal challenges or, more often than not in this region, macroeconomic collapse – lead to retrenchment and retreat.
However, data from Dealogic shows that JPMorgan’s success is not just a volume game.
While the bank had a strong performance in the Latin America product league tables last year it also outperformed in terms of fees – demonstrating that JPMorgan continues to keep a judicious eye on its own internal economics.
The bank was the leading fee generator in regional equity capital markets and loan arrangement, and led the volumes in DCM (it was second in fees). It also posted a strong result in regional M&A – coming sixth in volumes and fourth in fees.
In terms of quality, JPMorgan can point to many landmark deals across products and countries. It was the global coordinator and stabilization agent on the XP Inc IPO, which was undoubtedly the equity transaction of the year in the region.
The firm can also point to its lead-left mandates on the Petrobras and Banco do Brasil follow-ons, as well as leading other regional IPOs, such as its global coordination of Neoenergia’s $853 million listing – the largest ever by a Brazilian utility.
The bank also worked on complex restructurings that spanned product sets, such as the $8 billion syndicated loan that refinanced Pemex’s revolving credit facilities, followed by a $5 billion tender for its notes due between 2020 and 2023 and $7.5 billion of fresh cash from new seven-, 10- and 30-year bonds.
The bank also advised on transformative M&A deals throughout the region, testament to that regional span and the execution credibility of its team.
