Who saw that coming? The bank whose low-risk, emerging market-led approach and solid capital base eased it through the crisis is fast becoming the world’s favourite risk manager. Take a bow HSBC.
The signs were there in Euromoney’s 2011 rates survey, where the bank polled strongly across the board, backing up its longstanding emerging markets rates performance with big rises in sterling and dollar volumes. The big three in rates – Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan – is now a big four.
"On any given day, we’re among the largest sterling, dollar and euro market makers, in addition to the majority of the non-core markets," says Spencer Lake, the bank’s global co-head of markets. "Providing risk management solutions is quite critical to our DNA." It’s a bold claim, but the stats are starting to stack up. Even if the best days in complex rates structuring are over for many banks, rates revenues from HSBC’s corporate and institutional clients have increased after the crisis.