With online debt and equity offerings growing in volume, bankers and lawyers are rapidly having to adjust their thinking to new sets of rules - official and unofficial.
Wall Street, Europe - and increasingly Asia - appear to have decided to embrace online offerings as the way forward and there has been aggressive online marketing of bond issues. Ford Credit's $1.2 billion debt issue in January was the first time a bulge-bracket underwriter, Lehman Brothers, had helped a major US corporation to raise debt via the web, and it was just one in a series of online landmarks claimed by underwriters. Some of these online offerings have been limited to institutional investors but the World Bank's $3 billion global in mid-January was a break-through deal - open to both retail and institutional investors. Goldman Sachs, the World Bank's sole bookrunner, reported that more than a third of the total issue was sold on the web, the highest proportion on any online offering to date.