BNP Paribas Exane ranks No. 1 in II’s Developed Europe Sales Team for the seventh year in a row.
“Regardless of the equity market conditions, we know that we need to maintain our focus on the quality of service,” said Dina Geha, global head of distribution for BNP Paribas Exane. “Whether that’s helping our clients find new investment ideas, highlighting the best new research or helping them access management teams through conferences and events, we remain client-led in all that we do.”
The developed economies of Europe have been more resilient than expected, with a greater consensus on the soft-landing hypothesis, she said. “The result has been a pretty flat market overall,” Geha added. “Falling core inflation could be a big source of support for markets, as central banks bring the rate-rising cycle to a close and look ahead to potential cuts. Macro risks remain, not least the real estate slowdown in China and the risk to European energy prices as winter approaches.”
Geha credited BNP Paribas Exane’s success to her “very stable” team across all European markets, which has experienced very little turnover. “The main changes have been to add new talent at the early careers level in a few places — notably London, Paris, New York, and Stockholm.”
Investing and mentoring young talent is important in an ever-shifting European cash equities landscape. “We continue to see disruption to the sell side in European cash equities, driven by major exits or mergers across the market,” she said. “This means that the firms who commit have a huge opportunity to take market share. BNP Paribas has shown huge commitment to equities with its significant investments in recent years, which I believe means we are very well placed.”
To select the members of Institutional Investor’s 2023 Developed Europe Sales Team, we invited participants in the broader research survey to rate the firms on their generalist and specialist sales teams.
For Best Specialist Sales, voters rated the salespeople in each sector on a scale from 1-5. A numerical score for each sector was produced by weighting each vote based on both the responding firm’s European equity commissions and their rating.
Using those scores, ranks were then determined. Salespeople were designated runners‐up when their scores came within 35 percent of the third-place scores. We received responses from 1,869 money managers at 798 firms.
For Best Generalist Sales, voters rated firms on 6 attributes: adding value to research, global context, idea generation, market knowledge and feel, service and responsiveness, and understanding client needs. We received responses from some 1,495 buy-side money managers at 753 firms.
Voters are required to meet eligibility requirements, and all ballots are subject to review by II’s Research Operations Group.
Each vote is weighted by the voting firm’s European commission range and the rating awarded to create the rankings. The Generalist Sales Leaders table was calculated by adding together a firm’s overall scores within each attribute to produce a table of the top ten firms. Voters are required to meet eligibility requirements, and all ballots are subject to review by II’s Research Operations Group.