IFR Awards 2019: The winners

A slew of banks said trading revenue in the fourth quarter is ahead of last year to lift hopes for a strong end to a tough year, and market leader JP Morgan said its markets revenue will be "up meaningfully" from a year ago. Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse also all said last week that trading in the fourth quarter was ahead of a year ago, but signalled a weaker performance for advisory and debt and equity underwriting desks. JP Morgan said its rise in the fourth quarter will be driven by gains in fixed income, currency and...

Anglo-Dutch oil company Royal Dutch Shell has agreed a US$10bn revolving credit facility that features pricing based on the secured overnight financing rate, marking a major step in the loan market’s transition from Libor-based pricing to risk-free rates (RFRs) ahead of the planned cessation of Libor at the end of 2021. “Transactions such as this play a crucial role in establishing conventions that can be widely adopted across the market, and Shell has demonstrated real leadership by engaging with banks to demonstrate a path to a post-Libor...

It took less than two days of share trading for Saudi Aramco to secure the prized US$2trn valuation that bankers were unable to deliver on the oil giant's IPO. The rapid ascent led to energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman declaring the trading a "vindication" of the price that the government had sought - even if it was only briefly achieved on Thursday. More important than the chest-beating, though, is the question of whether the stock's run-up would prompt renewed interest from international accounts that largely avoided the SR96bn...

Deutsche Bank has scaled back its ambitions for a rapid clean-up of €250bn of legacy trades and former businesses, with the bank substantially cutting back its estimates for planned reductions in its capital release unit for this year and next. The unit is expected to still have a leverage exposure – the best gauge for the size of the portfolio – of €140bn by the end of this year and €50bn at the end of 2020. That is sharply higher than forecasts of €119bn and €17bn respectively when plans were announced in July. While substantial progress...

Citigroup is promoting 137 people to managing director in its institutional clients group (ICG), up 10% from 125 promotions in the business last year. Citi said 39 of the new MDs are in banking, capital markets and advisory, the unit that was set up last year to span capital markets origination and corporate and investment banking. "A promotion to managing director is a career-defining accomplishment," Paco Ybarra, head of ICG, said in a memo to staff announcing the promotions. The promotions are effective on January 1. The new MDs in BCMA...

HSBC has appointed new chiefs for its investment bank and risk management and hired a Hewlett-Packard executive to run operations under a sweeping leadership overhaul by interim chief executive Noel Quinn. The moves came two months before Quinn unveils a strategy update, in HSBC's latest attempt to kick-start growth and lift profitability. Europe's biggest bank said Georges Elhedery, head of global markets, and Greg Guyett, head of global banking, will take over as co-heads of its investment bank at the start of March, when current boss Samir...

Ping An Insurance's OneConnect Financial Technology has become the latest technology unicorn to scale back its IPO, highlighting the gap between valuations in the public and private markets. OneConnect raised US$312m from an NYSE IPO last week at US$10 per American depositary share, around half the valuation it achieved in its last private around. The fintech company, backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, managed to drag the deal across the finish line after cutting its fundraising target by almost half last Thursday, the last day of bookbuilding...

Brexit negotiations will dominate the early months of Boris Johnson's new UK government, and that will include an urgent need to hammer out details of "equivalence" for financial firms. Agreeing equivalence in financial services has been on the backburner for months, but bankers said it needed to quickly resurface as it was a complex issue and the market was still in the dark about much of it. If "equivalence" isn't agreed it will add significant costs and complexity for financial firms operating in the City. Some observers reckon the UK...

UBS is planning to double the investment banking headcount at its China securities joint venture, the head of its investment bank in Asia-Pacific said, one year on from becoming the first foreign bank to acquire a majority stake in a JV under new rules. "We don't have a fixed target per se. It has to be sustainable; it has to be profitable," said David Chin. "UBS Securities has altogether around 400 people currently and within that, I imagine that the investment banking component of that could easily double the size in three to four years."...

Banks’ trading units are pinning hopes for growth on one of the hottest buzzwords in finance: QIS. Quantitative investment strategies have become more prominent in recent years as a growing number of money managers embrace less conventional, and often more complex investment styles aimed at providing returns that are less reliant on the direction of broader markets. That has sparked a fierce scrap between investment banks eager to capitalise on the trend. QIS-related revenues at the largest investment banks have declined about 20% this year,...

Eurozone banks are set for a reduction in their capital requirements as new rules lower the bar for which bonds count towards the mandatory buffer, the European Central Bank's top supervisor said last week. Addressing the European Parliament in Brussels, Andrea Enria put that saving at 90bp of banks' common equity Tier 1 (CET1) requirements, which the ECB sets every year for the eurozone's largest banks. "According to our calculations, the change will generate an average reduction in CET1 requirements of 90bp, as banks will be able to rely on...

Around €14bn of leveraged loans are set to hit Europe’s loan market in the first quarter of 2020, promising a solid start to the year as the pipeline of new issuance builds. The pipeline involves deals of all sizes, from a €3bn-equivalent financing backing a buyout of UK defence and aerospace group Cobham to €690m of leveraged loans backing Platinum Equity’s acquisition of European biscuits manufacturer Biscuit International. “Holy moly, €14bn is more than I thought,” a senior banker said. "It won’t all come at the same time and people have...