Standard Chartered has appointed Annemarie Ganatra as its global head of medium-term notes based in Hong Kong, a spokeswoman at the bank has confirmed.
Ganatra, who started her first day at the bank on Monday, joined StanChart from HSBC in London, where she was the global head of MTNs and structured notes since February 2012. She left HSBC in May.
In the newly created role, Ganatra reports to Hong Kong-based Ashish Malhotra, head of bond syndicate, and is responsible for leading and managing StanChart’s MTN and private placement business globally.
“MTNs is a very important and strategic business segment for Standard Chartered Bank,” Malhotra told FinanceAsia. “With increasing focus on asset-liability management and prevailing liquidity, it allows us to provide bespoke solutions to meet our clients’ needs, with issuers as well as investors.”
Ganatra’s appointment comes at a perfect time for StanChart. The growth in MTNs and private placement activity over the past five years has been dramatic, with an increasing number of corporates taking advantage of investor appetite for direct lending.
Large Asian corporates have seized the opportunity to set up global medium-term note programmes amid the region's booming debt capital markets.
In the first half of this year for example, Taiwan’s largest semiconductor manufacturer Tencent established a $5 billion GMTN programme, while Hong Kong-based property developer Sino Land set up a $2 billion MTN programme.
As of August 1, G3 DCM bond volumes hit a record of $130 billion for the year, which is 32% higher than last year's volume during the same period, according to Dealogic.
And as for private placements, with the cost of borrowing a primary determinant of firms’ financing approach, private placements are still relatively common given the high regulatory costs associated with public issuance, according to Deutsche Bank in a report earlier this year.
Private placements in the domestic market accounted for the highest share of total corporate bond issuance in China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Korea.
In India, for example, more than 80% of the corporate bonds issued domestically in 2013 were through private placements, according to Dealogic data. Private placements have increased steadily in China but public issuance still dominates (at 78% of total domestic bond issuance in 2013).
Ganatra, who joined HSBC in 1997, ran the bank’s MTN teams in Hong Kong and New York, and was last in rates structuring in New York.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Ganatra obtained a Masters of international business from Grenoble Ecole de Management in France in 1997. She also holds a Masters in natural sciences, specialising in chemistry from The University of Cambridge.
