At the same time, investors are increasingly looking to the private route to gain access to decent-sized positions in a market where garnering allocations in the primary bond market has become something of a lottery. Secondary markets are effectively shut for size and syndicate managers are allocating the lion’s share of heavily over-subscribed new issues to a small number of top-end buy-side clients. This is leading to a huge amount of frustration as under or unallocated investors seek alternat

Ash Shah Barclays Akshay Shah is a managing director in Barclays’ private placement group based in London, responsible for the origination, structuring and distribution of private placements with a particular focus on UK, German and Southern European credits. Shah joined Barclays in 1998. Prior to joining the private placement team in 2002, he spent five years in the investment banking division focusing on the telecoms and technology and oil and gas sectors. Before joining Barclays, Shah worked

IFR: Welcome to IFR’s inaugural private placement roundtable. Private placements have received a lot of attention of late: from the perspective of moves towards Capital Markets Union in Europe; and as a result both of market conditions brought about by monetary stimulus and liquidity conditions  brought about by regulation. I wanted to kick off with a very general question. When we say private placements, what are we actually talking about? Bearing in mind we have US private placements, Euro PP,

IFR: Alain, if the Euro PP market grew out of investment banks’ placement strategies at an odd time in the market; if market conditions change, does that take away a driver for Euro PP or have you opened the box now? Alain Gallois, Natixis: We’re entering a phase where we’re moving towards standardisation. With more standardisation, you will attract more investors to come on board and you will start creating a virtuous circle where more investors understand the credits which by extension creates

IFR: Alain, the Euro PP Steering Committee is driven by marketing on one level which has already been mentioned. Was there an element of competition with the Pan European group? Alain Gallois, Natixis: In one sense, yes, but at the end of the day, not really. Even if there is slight competition between countries, the ultimate goal is to try to find the best framework for this market to build on. All the efforts which have been made are definitely going in the right direction in order to build th