Where the time goes on a placing: six spreadsheets and an inbox

Ask an ECM team how long a placing takes and you will usually hear about the hours between launch and book close. Those hours are real, but they are not where most of the admin sits. It is spread across the days either side, in work that rarely appears on a deal timetable: building lists, re-typing names, chasing replies, reconciling spreadsheets and rebuilding the compliance file.

This piece walks through a typical UK placing, stage by stage, and picks out the work that exists only because the information lives in several places at once.

1. Building the target list

Every deal starts with a list of who to approach. On most desks that list is assembled from a CRM export, the issuer’s share register, last deal’s spreadsheet and the sales team’s own notes. Each source spells institutions differently, has its own idea of who the right contact is, and is a few weeks out of date.

The work here is matching and cleaning, not judgement. Who should be on the list is a judgement the desk makes in minutes. Making sure the list reflects it, with the right people, the right gatekeepers and nobody who has asked not to be sounded, takes much longer.

2. Sending the soundings

Once the list is agreed, the approaches go out. On a manual process that means either one email at a time, personalised by hand, or a mail merge from a spreadsheet that someone has to set up and check. Each one has to carry the right wording, in the right order, to the right person.

Every message is also a compliance event. Who was approached, when, by whom and with what wording all need to be recorded, which on a manual desk usually means a second step: updating the spreadsheet once the email has gone.

3. Chasing and logging responses

Replies come back by email, phone and chat, often through gatekeepers rather than the investor. Each one has to be read, matched to the right row and logged: agreed to be wall-crossed, declined, wants to speak to someone first, out of office.

This is where the record starts to drift. A reply taken on the phone is logged later, or not at all. A gatekeeper agrees on behalf of three portfolio managers and only one row is updated. Two people update the same spreadsheet at once.

4. Wall-crossing and the material

Investors who agree are wall-crossed and receive the transaction material. The material has to go to them and nobody else, and only after they have agreed. On a manual process that is a separate email to a separate list, built by filtering the spreadsheet and hoping the filter is right.

5. Building the book

Orders arrive by email, chat, phone and through order platforms. Each has to be entered into the book, checked against the investor’s wall-cross status and updated as investors revise. The book often lives in yet another spreadsheet, and the syndicate, if there is one, has its own.

During the bookbuild nobody has time to do this carefully, so it is done quickly and checked afterwards. That checking is part of the admin, even if it happens after the deal has priced.

6. Allocations

Allocations are worked out against the final book, usually in a spreadsheet built for the purpose, then sent out to investors one by one. Every allocation has to match an order, and every order has to match an investor who was properly wall-crossed.

7. Trade confirmations and settlement

Allocated investors then need confirmations, and settlement contacts need the details. These are often different people from the ones who were sounded, so another list is built, from another source, and another round of emails goes out.

8. Cleansing and the compliance file

Finally, every investor who was wall-crossed has to be told the information is no longer inside information, and the whole sequence has to be recorded and kept. On a manual process this is where the compliance file is assembled: from the sent folder, the call notes, the response spreadsheet and the book. We have written separately about what that record needs to contain.

What the hours are actually spent on

Read back through those eight stages and very little of the time goes on the parts that need a banker’s judgement: who to approach, how to price, how to allocate. Most of it goes on moving the same information between places. The same investor’s name is typed, matched or filtered at almost every stage, and every move is a chance for an error that then has to be found and fixed.

That is the problem DealBridge was built to remove. The investor list, the soundings, the responses, the wall-crosses, the book, the allocations and the confirmations all live in one place, so each piece of information is entered once and every later stage uses it. The compliance record is kept as the deal runs rather than built afterwards.

We publish what that saves, and what one broker’s own audit log shows across more than a year of live transactions, on the DealBridge home page. To see the workflow end to end, read about bookbuilding in DealBridge or book a demo.