Asia’s leading lights

After a month of meetings and telephone interviews, we have reached final decisions about the winners of the Structured Products 2007 Awards for Excellence in Asia. The principal change from last year is the inclusion of an overall award for structured products in Asia that takes account of prowess in all areas of the business - equity derivatives, commodities, foreign exchange, structured funds, credit, hybrids, hedge funds and interest rates. The award also rewards the development of the banking franchise across the region.

As for Europe, the winner of the award this year is Barclays Capital, which has shown a remarkable rise in its share of the Asian market since it returned to the equity derivatives market in 2004. Other new awards were based around countries in which distributors have established structured products businesses. Whereas last year there was one regional distributor award, for 2007 we have discarded the broad category and instead rewarded distributors and banks in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea.

In making our decisions, we have analysed the pitch documents and interviewed all of the banks that made it onto shortlists. We have also reviewed the stories written over the past year in the magazine and discussed the developments in the market this year with distributors and investors across Asia to elicit the buy-side perspective.

The submissions and pitches for the awards were of an extremely high quality and we would like to thank those pitching in all categories for your time and effort.

Congratulations to the winners, and commiserations to those took part but did not win. While we cannot divulge shortlists, those that did not win should be assured that a number of the contests were extremely close in the final analysis.

The degree of investigation and analysis has enabled us to apply as objective a view as possible, but we would welcome any feedback and general comments you may have and will endeavour, where appropriate, to include them in next year's awards process.

Awards write-ups were compiled by Richard Jory, Matt Cameron, Sophia Morrell, Clive Davidson, Joe Marsh, Sarfraz Thind, Rachel Alembakis, Wendy Mock and Rob Davies.

Richard Jory, Editor.