CORPORATE EXPERIENCE
Corporate Finance Services & Select Corporate Finance Transactions
As an experienced Lead Manager and Co-Manager on debt and equity offerings, SWS provides issuers with insightful market coverage and value-added execution. We serve a broad spectrum of companies from publicly traded Fortune 500 corporations to privately held businesses. Our experienced team of bankers has longstanding client relationships in many industry sectors, including: utilities, energy, technology, communications, retail, health care, consumer products, financial institutions, and general industrial.
We seek to broaden and diversify each client’s investor base by distributing securities to our high quality, small and mid-tier institutional investor clients in addition to the industry’s largest asset managers. We take a comprehensive approach to every mandate – from developing a thorough understanding of the goals and potential of the issuer, to educating our experienced sales team, to introducing the story to suitable investors and generating substantive real-time feedback, to placing the securities with high quality investors and then providing subsequent non-deal services.
Corporate Finance highlights and milestones include:
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Corporate client base includes 74 of the Fortune 100
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Ranked as the #1 co-manager of investment grade corporate debt for the past 10 years
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Repurchased over 2.5 billion shares for over 100 corporate clients since 1997
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Named dealer on over 45 commercial paper programs
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Participated in more than 50% of corporate ESG bond issuance in 2020 and 2021
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First ever MWBE investment bank to serve as a Joint Book-Running Manager on a secondary equity offering
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Lead Manager on the first ever high-yield Social Bond
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Active Joint Bookrunner on the first commercial bank debt offering to mandate a MWBE firm in that role
Source for total deals and rankings: Thomson Reuters
Fixed Income Underwriting
SWS is a leading underwriter of taxable debt, both investment grade and high yield. Our offerings include senior and subordinated unsecured debt, medium-term notes, and asset-backed securities. The firm has ranked among the top 20 most active underwriters of corporate debt as measured by Thomson Reuters each year since 2000, and is the only privately-held investment bank to hold this distinction.
Equity Underwriting
Issuers of equity and equity-linked securities choose us as an underwriter because we bring a knowledgeable deal team, a strong balance sheet, a broad institutional investor base and a track record of working to achieve best results. Our participation in an issuer’s IPO is the first phase of the deep relationship we seek to build through value-added engagement and a growing platform of service offerings.
Share Repurchase
Share repurchase is a core business for us at SWS. Starting with our first repurchase mandate for General Motors in 1997, we are well over 2.5 billion shares repurchased on behalf of dozens of corporate clients under both 10b-18 and 10b5-1 agreements. In addition to trade execution, our experienced traders are available to advise on program structure and strategies and our highly regarded operations team adds the critical element of seamless settlement to our service offering.
Commercial Paper
SWS is the only independent broker-dealer to have a meaningful presence in the commercial paper market, serving as a dealer on 44 corporate CP programs.
Our objective is to expand each issuer’s investor base by educating our investors to approve the issuer’s credit, targeting a broad spectrum of small and large investors, and executing reverse inquiry.
Given our extensive experience working with the rating agencies, bond issuers, banks and investors, our clients can be confident that we will work to achieve their objectives and aim to yield the lowest-cost financings available.
Strategic Advisory
The Strategic Advisory group provides advice and execution to publicly-traded and private companies across several major industries including Consumer & Retail, Energy & Utilities, Financial Institutions, Technology & Media, Healthcare and Diversified & Industrials. We leverage our extensive industry knowledge, transaction experience and networks to assist clients with their strategic and financial goals. The team is led by senior bankers with a combined 60+ years of transaction experience with leading bulge bracket banks. Our capabilities include a complete suite of financial and strategic advisory services:
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Mergers, Acquisitions and Diversitures
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Fairness Opinions
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Valuation Services
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Public and Private Capital Raises
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Capital Structure Advisory
Government-Sponsored Enterprise
SWS is consistently ranked among the top Diversity and Inclusion Dealers of US Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) debt securities.
The firm underwrites, distributes, and trades the debt securities of all major GSEs, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks system (FHLB), the Federal Farm Credit Banks System (FFCB) and Farmer Mac.
Our GSE debt underwriting, and trading activities include the sale of discount notes, bullet and callable coupons and commercial and residential mortgage-backed securities (including Credit Risk Transfer).
Our investing clients value our strong relationships with the key funding personnel at each of these issuers and are assured of our innovation and expertise to accomplish their investment goals.
We also distribute and trade the debt of supranational/sovereign issuers, including underwriting the short-term debt securities of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (Word Bank) and Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).
Contact David Finkelstein & Sobani Warner, Co-Heads of Corporate Finance:
(212) 830-4536 | (212) 830-4566