Citi
This is always a tough award to judge, in large part because being a dab hand in the capital markets does not automatically make a bank a great corporate lender.
Even the big universal lenders aren’t great at both aspects of the financial arts everywhere they go. But Citi in India is one of the rare exceptions.
It serves more than 900 multinationals and 200 or so big local firms, supporting customer assets in excess of $32 billion, including credit disbursed domestically by offshore branches. Each year its book grows, as does its roster of big-ticket clients. Citi is the leading custodian bank in India, with more than $260 billion in assets under custody. It’s a top-three trade finance bank, a leading provider of FX services, and the number-one foreign bank in export flows, with a market share of 8.7%.
In investment banking, Citi remains as strong as ever. It was the leading bookrunner on equity and equity-linked issuances over the review period, the number two in onshore G3 debt sales, and the number three in completed M&A. In all, it helped clients raise $27.1 billion across equity, debt and loan markets, enabling the bank to post internal revenues of $1.74 billion in the calendar year 2018 – a record high. What impresses most about the lender, run by Pramit Jhaveri, chief executive of Citi India, and Ravi Kapoor, head of global banking, is its transaction consistency. When there is big deal to be done, whether a sovereign print or a market-moving IPO or a complex private placement, Citi is usually involved.
Standout deals over the past year include a $485 million private placement by IndInfravit Trust, completed in May 2018, and the sale by Tata Sons in March 2018 of a 1.5% stake in TCS, which raised $1.4 billion, making it the largest onshore block trade in the TMT sector since 2015. Citi was a joint bookrunner on both.