IFR Awards 2024
If there’s one thing that the reelection of US president Donald Trump has shown, it is that Europe needs to sort itself out. That’s the case in many areas, but in IFR’s world, it is banking and capital markets – in particular EU banking and capital markets union.
The person who did most to advance that vital development was not a politician, regulator or central banker. It was a bank CEO, UniCredit's Andrea Orcel.
It’s commonplace to describe UniCredit’s bid for Commerzbank as “audacious” – and perhaps it was – but it shouldn’t have been. By the European Union’s own logic, such a move should be, if not simple (no cross-border M&A is simple – especially not in banking) then perfectly possible and certainly not a matter of extreme controversy with politicians lining up to stop it.
EU politicians and regulators talk a good game about banking union and EU integration. Orcel has called their bluff by taking them at their word. Will the deal happen? Who knows. But it should. And if it doesn’t, Orcel will have exposed the gap between what politicians and regulators say they want and what they will actually allow.
The Commerz soap opera is not the only reason UniCredit has won our Bank of the Year award. It is the eye-catching icing on the cake of the great progress the bank has made in the nearly four years since Orcel took over as CEO. It has shown that European banks can be profitable, entrepreneurial and increasingly dynamic, even if there remains much work to be done.
Despite IFR recognising a European bank as our top award winner – and a host of European banks in other categories – the big-picture story of the banking and finance industry in 2024 was the ever-increasing dominance of the big US banks – and their return to levels of profitability only previously seen in idiosyncratic years like 2009 (an artificial high after the financial crisis) and 2021 (boosted by the pandemic).
Outsize returns in 2024 came in a relatively normal year. There wasn’t a crisis in sight, at least not a new one. In fact, given the quiet M&A and ECM markets, particularly for IPOs, and downturns in previously lucrative arenas like China and Hong Kong, optimists would say that there is even more room for strong growth in 2025 and beyond.
Those looking on the bright side would also point to the return of Japan as a venue for dealmaking, the fact that private equity shops need to make disposals to keep their particular ball rolling and the supposedly business-friendly Trump administration as more reasons that the good times for banking will continue. Not to mention the opportunities around artificial intelligence in terms of dealmaking and efficiencies.
Perhaps. As journalists, we’re constitutionally inclined to think that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, so discount this as much as you need to on that basis. But as it stands valuations are extremely stretched, despite an elevated level of political and economic uncertainty – much of it emanating from the White House. Will 2025 be another “normal” year? As this awards edition goes to press, that really doesn't seem very likely.
You can read about the award winners here.
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