A mainstay in DCM worklife is the weekly DCM team meeting. These meetings last about 30 minutes and usually involve a desk head from each client base (SSA, Corporates, FIG, EM, High Yield, products..) giving an update on their market. Back in my DCM days, I would sometimes wonder how participants would score these meetings. Glancing around the room, by the number of people playing on phones/blackberries, for most I’d guess it was a pretty round number.
And it’s understandable. If you cover public sector institutions, why spend 30 minutes hearing about the number of turns of leverage required to clear high-yield syndications?
Yet they persist, and with good reason.
I was fortunate in my career to work with some brilliant bankers, with decades of experience. They would leave these meetings with reams of notes and build compelling narratives to report to clients. In such a competitive space, providing clients with an original angle or datapoint every day takes real application. A world class DCM professional should see these meetings not as an irreconcilable information dump but as an opportunity.
What’s more, new IT solutions and datasets are improving DCM’s data analysis capabilities like never before. In turn, the potential to leverage your DCM network is greater than it has ever been. If you cover frequent borrowers, and you detect a common thread in another sector, you can now effortlessly sift through more and more primary market data in seconds and get the answers you need.
Collaboration across DCM has always been valuable, though not always obvious. New tools mean the opportunity to turn this collaboration into revenues is increasing. Leading the charge on this evolution is Bots, an operating platform for DCM which digitalises the pre-trade workflow.
Please reach out to us for more details.