26 November 2024: IEM Finance Survey - Primary dealers as perceived by investors

IEM Finance conducted the 22nd online annual survey of French primary dealers’ (SVTs) clients from 9 September to 27 September 2024. Its aim is to assess the quality of commercial relationship and services provided by primary dealers to their clients, as well as clients’ views on the functioning of the French government debt market.

In 2024, 184 investors, representing a total of 92 institutions (Asset Management companies, Banks, Insurance companies...), responded to the questionnaire. This corresponds to a response rate of 26% in terms of respondents and 34.2% in terms of institutions surveyed.

Main results of the survey:

1. The French government debt market:

• Investor satisfaction is very high on the functioning of French government debt market. Among all investors, 97.6 % declared to be “very satisfied” or “satisfied”.

• Liquidity and transparency are highly valued by investors, who consider these criteria to be important for a sovereign issuer, such as France. They were 92.9% to assess liquidity as “very important” and 74.9 % of them had the same assessment regarding transparency. It is the highest level ever recorded since the introduction of this question in 2005. Next come predictability and innovation, assessed as “very important” by 56.7% and 10.7% investors respectively in 2024.

• Liquidity is considered to be satisfactory (“very satisfactory” or “satisfactory”) by a very large number of investors for BTF, nominal and inflation-linked OAT. On nominal OAT, almost all investors (98.1%) were satisfied. This proportion also increased for BTFs and reached 95.7%, against 93.4% in 2023 and 90.3% in 2022.

• Beyond information provided by AFT, a vast majority of investors (93.4%) were “satisfied” by the information received from French public institutions on economic policy and public finances.

• A large majority of investors declared that they were “very satisfied “or “satisfied” by the tapping of existing securities. Among investors who expressed their opinion, 99.2% declared to be satisfied.

• Investors, who expressed an opinion, declared to be satisfied with the information published on Green OATs at 94.5%. 

   

2. The Primary dealers - SVTs:

• On fixed-income markets overall, the top-five most frequently quoted primary dealers by investors as being their main partner are:

• On the French government debt market, the top-five most frequently quoted primary dealers by investors as being their main partner are:

• For investors, being a primary dealer is still the most important criterion for the selection of an intermediary (the share of investors surveyed who consider this criterion as “very important or important” stands at 75.8 %), followed by the League Table published by AFT at the beginning of the year, which assesses the performance of primary dealers on the primary and secondary markets and in terms of the quality of the service offered (37.2%, increasing by 2.1 percentage points).

• Investors also gave their opinion on attention paid to the quality of various services offered by primary dealers:

  • The quality of pricing remains largely ahead of investor expectations. Indeed, more than 95% of them are still assessing it as “very important”. It is the highest level ever recorded since the launch of the survey in 2003, higher than the 94.6% recorded in 2023. 

  • Information, advice and sales coverage come in second place. Half the investors consider those services to be “very important”.

  • Lastly, quality of research and back/middle office come third and fourth respectively this year, with almost the same share of investors rating them as “very important” (32% and 31.8%). For back/middle office, it is the highest level recorded since 2008. 

Contact:
+33 1 40 04 15 50 – contact@aft.gouv.fr