Citi retains the award of best bank for financing – one of very few to be retained in a volatile year – for being good at everything it does across the financing space.
Citi calls itself “an integrated financing engine”, which sounds a bit like a Transformer but does cover all the right bases. The skill of Citi is not just that it can do equity, bond, loan and structured finance, but that the teams appear to talk to one another.
Citi is not as good as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley on equity, raises less Hong Kong debt than HSBC, and (probably) does less creative private financing than Credit Suisse or Deutsche Bank, but the sum of its parts is better placed to win this award than any of them.
Citi’s strengths are best illustrated by the deals in which it serves multiple roles for the same client according to the needs of the time.