Derivatives Global Awards

An integrated and collaborative approach that delivers a first class service to clients

Effective risk management assumed even greater importance over the last 12 months as Asian market participants sought help navigating upheaval in global markets.

GlobalCapital revealed the winners of its Global Derivatives Awards for 2021 on Wednesday night at a gala event in London

Many law firms claim, but few can demonstrate truly global connectivity and collaboration between partners and practice areas in parallel with the provision of deep financial markets experience and expertise across transactional, product and regulatory issues.

On a number of fronts, Eurex excelled in its support of, and offering to, the derivatives market in the past year. It demonstrated its strength as Europe’s largest and one of the world’s leading derivatives exchanges, and an ability to innovate and push forward new segments in risk transfer markets.

Across several areas of the interest rate derivatives business, Nomura distinguished itself from the competition in the past year, not only stepping in to provide clients with crucial liquidity, but also supporting them with a valuable mix of timely and authoritative advice and market-leading structuring and execution capabilities.

According to technology consultant Celent, conventional rules-based paradigms of approaching risk and compliance obligations have given way to risk-based approaches where greater supervision intensity is placed on high risk or systemically important financial institutions, appropriate conduct, and emergent systemic risks.

Tradeweb is the winner of this GlobalCapital’s OTC trading venue of the year award in what has been an extraordinary time for electronic trading. During the stressed market conditions of spring, Tradeweb stayed committed to innovating and creating efficiencies for its clients, which made it a clear winner of this category. While this award recognises Tradeweb’s achievements in derivatives, its presence in Treasuries, mortgages and exchange traded fund markets should be noted too, especially as much of its recent work has focussed on creating efficiencies across these product lines.

Tradeweb’s commitment to connecting people and markets by bridging liquidity pools and its work on boosting analytics to help new asset classes prepare for electronification set it apart from its rivals — and led to the company being named GlobalCapital’s OTC Trading Venue of the Year.

For its work in helping clients across Europe navigate a raft of regulations — from Brexit to Ibor transition and initial margin reporting — Clifford Chance is GlobalCapital’s European Law Firm of the Year for regulatory work.

In January, Singapore Exchange (SGX) found itself centre stage when the Covid-19 pandemic began to flare up in China. With some Asian markets closed for Chinese New Year, investors dashed to it. “SGX was the only market open for China-proxy risk management and we saw impact across our derivatives shelf,” said Michael Syn, senior managing director at SGX.

Few firms possess the breadth of derivatives product expertise that Mayer Brown has, and it stands out for its global reach and leading practices on both sides of the Atlantic.