How does feedback get from an investor to an issuer? If investment banks are involved, the answer has traditionally been: “very inefficiently”.
First, an investor might call a salesperson at the bank. They say their piece and the salesperson duly writes it down. They, in turn, call the syndicate desk to tell them the feedback. The desk writes it down. Someone calls the head of syndicate, who writes it down. The head calls someone in capital markets, who writes it down.
Eventually, they will email or call the client, hoping that what they are about to tell them is roughly the same as what it was at the start of the chain.
What has happened in between is a huge amount of time wasted on verbal communication. True, this might have involved slightly less friction when everyone was in the same building, enabling people to walk the floor, but that’s not the story of 2020.
Conundrum cracked
One bank thinks it has cracked this conundrum, mandating a phone-only-when-absolutely-necessary policy for situations such as this. Feedback from an investor can be sent via instant messenger from the salesperson to someone senior, such as a syndicate head, and then forwarded to the issuer.
For this bank, it’s about digitizing an inefficient process, freeing up time for information “enrichment”, rather than the tiresome passing on of messages from one person to another.
Surely something could be lost, wonders Euromoney? What about those discussions that happen all the way along that chain that probably help with that enrichment? That nugget of information that will differentiate a banker’s dialogue with a client?
Simple! Regular video conference calls, where all of it can be shared in what one banker describes as “a more efficient forum of replicating the inter-office connectivity that comes from walking the floor”. We certainly hope so.
Banking, meet the 21st century. You’ll like each other.
