After enduring criticism for years of its refusal to provide client service and relationship management from London as well as Brusels, Euroclear has created a dedicated relationship management team in London – but only for primary market participants.
Euroclear says the new team will be responsible for all aspects of relationship management with lead managers and issuers’ agents across the various Euroclear entities in the international marketplace.
“As the primary-market landscape continues to grow and evolve, both in terms of size and complexity, we remain fully committed to ensuring that optimal levels of support are in place to meet the needs of all the stakeholders involved in the securities-issuance chain,” says Yannic Weber, Managing Director and head of the Commercial division of Euroclear SA/NV. “By establishing a dedicated and experienced team of relationship managers in Europe’s leading marketplace for new issues, we hope to be able to serve our clients’ interests even better, while also streamlining existing processes.”
The new team, which reports to Philippe Laurensy, Director and group head of Euroclear’s primary-market relationship-management teams, is headed by Dan Kuhnel, who joined Euroclear from the London office of Clearstream International on 1 April.
The team will complement the client-facing services offered by Euroclear S.A. in Paris, which has a similar franchise with French issuers active in the primary market. It will also work closely with the Operations and Product Management divisions across the various Euroclear entities.
“The primary market is a domain in which Euroclear operations, network management, product management, legal and relationship management are all required to work in close co-operation,” explains a Euroclear spokesman. “Primary-market activities involve a significant number of different market professionals, including issuers, corporate bankers, corporate trust departments, syndicate desks, law firms and the documentation teams that assist with the drafting of the new-issue documentation and liaise with settlement systems to ensure the new issue is deemed eligible for acceptance.”
At the end of 2004, the value of international debt outstanding1 was USD 13.9 trillion (EUR 10.6 trillion). New issues were valued at USD 3.3 trillion (EUR 2.5 trillion), of which USD 773 billion (EUR 592 billion) was issued in the eurozone. In 2003, the total value of new issues was USD 2.9 trillion (EUR 2.2 trillion), with USD 740 billion (EUR 566 billion) in the eurozone.