Citi retains the award of best bank for financing – one of very few to be retained in a volatile year – for being good at everything it does across the financing space.
Citi calls itself “an integrated financing engine”, which sounds a bit like a Transformer but does cover all the right bases. The skill of Citi is not just that it can do equity, bond, loan and structured finance, but that the teams appear to talk to one another.
Citi is not as good as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley on equity, raises less Hong Kong debt than HSBC, and (probably) does less creative private financing than Credit Suisse or Deutsche Bank, but the sum of its parts is better placed to win this award than any of them.
Citi’s strengths are best illustrated by the deals in which it serves multiple roles for the same client according to the needs of the time. A good example is the Indian transport finance group Shriram, for whom Citi arranged a $274 million equity follow-on, a $475 million debut social bond, and a $45 million non-recourse financing backed by auto receivables, all within our review period.
Another is Judo, the Australian neobank. During our review period Citi not only was on its A$653 million ($469 million) IPO, but also a private placement and a securitization. Or China Mengniu Dairy, for whom Citi arranged a $2 billion equity follow-on, $500 million senior bond and a HK$2.3 billion ($293 million) green loan facility. In South Korea Citi handled both an IPO (Korea’s largest ever) and an ESG dollar bond for LG.
The fact that these deals and clients cover India, Australia, Hong Kong, China and Korea tells its own story; there are plenty of further examples across southeast Asia and Japan too.
What’s fascinating to me is that in a market that is down, we are still winning market share
Jan Metzger
Citi’s geographical reach is exceptional, but just as impressive is the range of products and structures it can deploy: bank capital, sustainable bonds, liability management. There was an LBO for Hexaware, the first investment trust structured bond offering for Summit Digital, Asia’s first green dollar subordinated hybrid for GLP. Citi can do it all.
“In an ‘up’ market, we gained market share,” says Jan Metzger, head of Asia Pacific banking, capital markets and advisory. “What’s fascinating to me is that in a market that is down, we are still winning market share. It is because we have a diversification no other firm has.”
