Bond Awards

A combination of local presence and global knowledge has long helped Santander Corporate & Investment Banking keep a leading position in Latin America debt capital markets — where it has been in the top five for many years. Santander is now focused on filling out its platform in more of the region’s countries, while its global strengths in environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters and project and infrastructure finance are helping it deliver for the new challenges its clients are facing.

Tradeweb has been at the forefront of the development of bond trading for two decades, but it hasn’t stopped evolving as it works with dealers and institutional investors to meet the growing demand for electronification. The SSA market has been a big beneficiary, with rapid take-up of automated trading tools and ever more liquidity available on the platform.

The European Investment Bank has had a long-standing and leading bond market franchise, but after reconfiguring its funding team in 2019 it has put in place a structure that readies it for future challenges.

MarketAxess has long been at the forefront of the evolution in emerging markets bond trading and is now spearheading the next changes in the globalisation of the business. Its Open Trading architecture is connecting ever more participants and cutting trading costs, its automated trading innovations are freeing up traders for to do more valuable work, and its roll out of a request-for-market protocol is fundamentally changing market structure across all markets.

It’s fair to say that 2020 has been a difficult year for many issuers to navigate, but at First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), head of group funding Rula AlQadi could afford to be sanguine when the markets closed down in the early stages of the Covid pandemic.

NatWest Markets, part of NatWest Group, has achieved dominant overall market share in sterling for financial institutions, while its breadth of activity has given it a leading role in more complex products that require closer engagement with the buy-side, such as acquisition finance, Libor transition and innovative liability management exercises.

GlobalCapital is delighted to announce the winners of its Bond Awards 2020.

The resurgence of the Maple bond market from its lows since the 2008 financial crisis has delivered a healthy flow of sovereign, supranational and agency borrowers over the last year. RBC Capital Markets has been at the forefront of the revival, delivering some of the year’s biggest transactions and leading the league tables.

Few firms can match Rothschild & Co when it comes to the longevity of their client relationships — its oldest has endured for more than a century. In a business such as corporate debt advisory, in which relationships are crucial, that kind of lineage is an important advantage.

When in March and April market circumstances swung from being most the attractive seen for years in terms of spread and coupon levels to what were the most challenging since at least the eurozone crisis, bank borrowers lost any certainty of market access for even the plainest unsecured debt. That environment suited JPMorgan, which had the size and skillset to pilot clients through the storm.

The poll to determine GlobalCapital's Bond Awards 2020 is open. Until June 30, market participants are invited to choose the firms and individuals who have performed most impressively in the past year.

2019 proved more fruitful for supranational, sovereign and agency borrowers than was expected in 2018 — in part thanks to a rejuvenation of the ECB’s asset purchase programme and a wholesale return to dovish monetary policies. GlobalCapital’s SSA team used its editorial judgment, with inspiration from GC’s world famous bond comments, to pick the top trades of the year. We strove to find deals that were not just the biggest, but that set pricing markers, were innovative and brave, or made an impression in other ways. GC presents the winners here. Congratulations to the issuers and banks involved.