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Ireland
BNP Paribas Securities Services
The French bank did not attract enough responses to reach
a definitive view on the quality of the services it provides to
investors and traders in Irish securities. However, the details
behind the averages do contain some clear, if familiar, messages.
Nobody doubts that their cash and securities are safe with BNP
Paribas. It keeps on top of regulations that affect clients. The
client service officers and RMs are top quality. And the scores
for settlement efficiency are unequivocally excellent, but (as in
most markets in this survey) their equivalents in asset-servicing
fade away.
The familiarity is not surprising: Most clients of BNP Paribas
use the bank in multiple markets. One of them does explain
an otherwise baffling combination of scores in relationship man-
agement and technology. It seems that systems changes led to
platform instability, which matters to broker-dealers. “As clients
it is very often us who spot an issue and have to chase BNP to
confirm that, yes, there is in fact a problem,” he writes. “We have
had at least two outages last more than a day.”
Citi
Citi attracted a small but sufficient number of responses to be
assessed here. As in 2017, the average scores that it collects from
clients are not flattering. They are, however, consistent with the
longstanding strengths of the bank.
After the averages are disentangled, it becomes clear that once
again Citi is impressing clients most with credit, technology and
settlement.
Settlement has, of course, become an issue in Ireland since
the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June
2016. At present, trades in Irish equities settle with Euroclear
CREST in London and bonds with Euroclear Bank in Brussels.
Having ditched plans to create an indigenous (and fund-centric)
central securities depository (CSD)of their own, the Central
Bank of Ireland and the leadership of the Irish financial services
industry turned to Euroclear.
Having announced in February this year that it had decided
in principle to establish a new CSD in Ireland, Euroclear later
abandoned this idea. Euroclear will instead continue to set-
tlement Irish securities in euro, sterling and US dollars from
London and Brussels on an interim basis that is likely to be at
least as long as any transition of the United Kingdom out of the
EU. Market participants await a long-term solution, which may
soon become urgent.
Dublin is not the largest market in the Citi clearing and custo-
dy network, but it may become more important if the ambitions
of the Irish Stock Exchange are fulfilled. It lists only 50 stocks,
but since its acquisition by Euronext in March this year it has
become part of a multi-national enterprise with a substantial
pool of liquidity for Irish issuers to tap and traders to exploit.
More importantly, Euronext lists a lot of funds – the financial
services industry at which Ireland really excels – and the com-
bined enterprise will be hoping to grow the number of Exchange
Traded Funds (ETFs) that are traded. Euronext has also posi-
tioned itself as the leading exchange for debt listings.
WEIGHTED AVERAGE SCORES
BNP Paribas Citi
Market Average Global Average
Market share (% of responses) 56% 44%
Relationship management 4.71 4.18 4.47 5.20
Client service Account management 4.87 4.85 4.86 5.40
5.33 4.24 4.74 5.44
Asset safety 5.09 5.19 5.15 5.68
Risk management 3.73 5.20 4.66 5.46
Liquidity management 4.14 4.76 4.42 4.89
Regulation and compliance 5.14 4.63 4.89 5.64
Innovation 5.13 4.50 4.82 5.18
Asset servicing 5.01 4.68 4.84 5.09
Pricing 4.39 4.30 4.33 4.82
Technology 4.86 5.37 5.15 5.28
Cash management and FX 3.33 4.90 3.85 4.25
Total 4.68 4.71 4.69 5.24
86
Global Custodian
Fall 2018