Equity sales teams may have adapted to remote work — but there’s still no beating in-person interactions for the top firms and their buy-side clients.
“The last year reinforced the deep value in face-to-face interaction,” said Nick Savone, global head of institutional equities sales at Morgan Stanley. “As 2021 progressed and many clients returned to their offices, we found that client interest to interact in person was very high. Oftentimes, especially in early days of 2021, we were told that we were the first bank investors saw in person during the pandemic.”
Savone expects a hybrid approach — with both in-person and virtual engagement across analyst marketing, corporate access, global advisory, and sector sales teams — to remain dominant, as it has opened up a great deal of flexibility for the firm and its clients. But ultimately, he said, “this is a people-driven business,” he said.
And the people have spoken...
2021 marks the 50th edition of the All-America Research Team and third year for publication of the survey’s commission-weighted results (previous years’ results were weighted by companies’ assets under management). The commission-weighted approach more accurately reflects how the buy-side values and rewards the sell-side for their research advisory services.
This year’s survey included a new sector, ESG, allowing asset managers to recognize those firms with investing expertise in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) category.
Selection Criteria
To select the members of the All-America Research Team, Institutional Investor solicited opinions of directors of research and investment professionals at asset management firms with a commission and/or a research wallet of at least US$250k and who are recognized as using sell-side research advisory services. For the All-America survey, we received responses from 3,565 individuals at 1,475 firms. The names of individuals surveyed are kept confidential to ensure their continuing cooperation.
Participants rated their top firms in each sector and then separately rated individual analysts at those firms to create two distinct rankings for each sector. A numerical score was produced by weighting each vote based on the responding firm’s commissions or assets under management in the sector and the rating awarded. This created the Commissions and AUM-weighted rankings.
Using those scores, ranks were determined. Firms/analysts are awarded a “Runner‐Up” position if their score comes within 35 percent of the third-place score in a sector. For the analyst rankings, the cut-off date for individuals is the date of the survey opening (1st June 2021).
Voters must meet strict eligibility requirements, and winners must achieve a minimum vote count. All ballots are subject to review by the Research Operations Group.
These rankings were compiled by Senior Editors Tucker Ewing, Denise Hoguet and Researchers Denise Best and Xiao Lu.
All-America Sales & Corporate Access
In addition to Research, voters are invited to rate firms on both Sales and Corporate Access criteria at the firm level only. Voters could rate firms for their overall Generalist Sales across six performance attributes. For Specialist Sales, voters could rate up to seven firms in the eight categories. For Corporate Access, buy-side voters could rate up to seven firms in each of the seven categories. Corporate voters ranked their top four firms across five performance attributes.