Best bank for online fixed income
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
The most frequent claim in e-finance is that automating trading processes leaves banks free to concentrate on building client relationships and providing research and analytics. Most banks fail to achieve this. They join consortia and they trade online or through Bloomberg systems, showing the world that they are big in e-commerce, but they don't develop anything extra. So clients and investors get the same old services with a bit of fancy online research.
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is the only bank that bucks the trend, and it wins the overall award for the best bank in online fixed income for several reasons. What stands out here is a refreshing strategy for trading, driven by a committed senior management. Rather than building online functions only for core products, it puts the market's finest analytics tools into niche areas such as ABS and aircraft securitization. On top of that, it is one of the few banks that has realized that it is not only investors who want to use web technology. Issuers want more than just e-bookbuilding.
But the choice of MSDW for this award will raise a few eyebrows.