Our expert panellists did a fabulous job of cutting through to the essence of the issues and we had a spirited discussion. Economic growth and the need for capital markets to fund corporate expenditure ran through the conversation. In short capital markets volumes looked at in isolation mean little if they’re not viewed through the lens of capital need and growth funding. There was broad agreement that YTD 2015 capital markets outcomes had reflected reduced need for capital more than anything el

Mangesh Kulkarni Axis Capital Mangesh Kulkarni is head of structured finance at Axis Capital and has over 21 years of experience in the Indian debt markets. Prior to joining Axis in 2011, Kulkarni worked at Enam, IDFC, Indian Oiltanking, SICOM and Reliance Capital in structured finance, fundraising and corporate strategy. Sumit Jalan Credit Suisse Sumit Jalan is a senior coverage banker at Credit Suisse in charge of equity and equity-linked business in India, along with his sponsors and coverage

IFR: Welcome to IFR’s latest India Offshore Financing Roundtable. In our discussion, we’ll review ECM activity to-date, including IPOs, and contrast 2015 deal flow with expectations set a year ago. The financing landscape in India is changing so we’ll also touch on the changing External Commercial Borrowing regime. I wanted in particular to gauge the panel’s thoughts about the development of the Masala Bond market. But let’s start with ECM. At the end of 2014, expectations for the following year

IFR: On a technical question around execution, especially around issues that have fallen on debut, the questions that it raised in my mind is underwriters in India don’t have many tools to deal with that situation and in some respects are hostage to fortune. Globally underwriters have things like over-allotment options and there are all sorts of mechanisms and mechanics at play to deal with stabilisation. Would you like to have more stabilisation tools at your disposal as an underwriter executin

IFR: Bharat, do you buy the notion of disintermediation taking hold increasingly in India? And could the process be accelerated given high levels of NPLs at the State banks, which in turns might constrain their ability to lend? Bharat Reddy, JP Morgan: To answer your question in a slightly different way, we were at a meeting yesterday with one of the leading private sector banks. I was surprised to note that they said they had seen significant uptake in lending to medium and small enterprises. A