Thompson Financial

Thomson Financial's standard league tables are rankings of Investment Banks in terms of the dollar volume of deals they work on. New standard league table sessions in compliance with 2004 league table criteria for Debt, Equity, Syndicated loan, Project Finance and M&A are currently available. Notice that this is revenue and dollar volume of securities issued (in underwriting) or transaction size (in M&A), not profitability .

Usage

League tables are used in two contexts: either in promotional materials or client pitches produced by an investment bank, or tabulated by a financial information tool, such as mergermarket, Dealogic, Thomson Financial or Bloomberg.

When used in bank-produced materials, the company is always in control of deciding how to tabulate each table and which ones to show to customers. Banks naturally never show unflattering league tables, so one rarely sees league tables where the firm is not in the top 3. Banks seeking to enter a new space may show two tables side by side from the previous and the current year to show how they have improved. As mentioned above, the details of how each table was calculated are essential to understanding how much these tables have been tweaked.

Growing concerns about credibility of league tables have led some banks to use actual screenshots of Bloomberg's league tables in their materials to emphasize that no tweaks were used to manipulate the ranking. The selection bias of only showing the favorable rankings still holds however. In order to get the most complete information, one should access leagues tables on Bloomberg, Thomson Financial, or any other reputable source (they all rely on a third-party database that actually stores information on all announced deals or collect the data themselves for deal related information). For convenience, most common league tables are reproduced below for recent years.

Criticisms

League tables are important for classifying investment banks by their area of expertise, but are a very imprecise way of ranking investment banks within broad categories. League tables give equal credit to all investment banks involved with a transaction, even if one of them collected the bulk of the fees, was hired first, and had more responsibility. With the emergence of financial supermarkets and stapled finance, companies are often accused of tacitly doling out league table credit to banks to secure better terms on the financing for the transaction.

Most damaging to the tables' credibility, however, has been the way league tables are tabulated and used in investment bank pitches to clients and prospective hires. Exploiting the fact that there's no "industry standard" in calculating league tables, bankers instruct their analysts to tweak the way the tables are tabulated to make the home institution appear higher in the tables, ideally in the top 3. Most common tweaks include counting or excluding announced but uncompleted deals, deals smaller than a certain size, deals in a given geographic area, the date range, and so on. These details are usually listed at the bottom of each table, and should always be scrutinized.

Debt and equity

2004

2003

Mergers and acquisitions

2005

2004

2003

230,415.3

See also

• Advisory services
• Debt levels and flows
• Financial services
• Mergers & acquisitions
• Underwriting

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