Bond issuers may occasionally give their bankers the run-around in an effort to reward other relationships or cut their fee bills.
However, it's not often that they have the chance to trounce them so publicly as they did in the issuers versus borrowers capital markets quiz at Euromoney's Global Borrowers and Investors Forum in London last month.
To be fair the quiz, over several rounds, was hotly contested. The bankers team, comprising Charlie Berman of Citigroup, May Busch of Morgan Stanley, Joe Dryer of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Robert Gray of HSBC, was running neck and neck with the issuers until the very last question about American-style options and when they can be exercised.
But crucially it was Soren Elbech of Eksportfinans who beat the bankers on the buzzer with the right answer, winning victory for him and John Borthwick of International Finance Corporation, Cassio Calil of IBM, and René Karsenti of the European Investment Bank.
One of the bankers attempted to play down the defeat, saying that the scoring format penalized risk takers prepared to venture an answer they weren't entirely sure of. "That's why we're triple-A and you're not," retorted Elbech.