Dear Friends,

This year, we are taking the opportunity to combine our thank you for meeting us during the IBA week in Miami with our greetings for the upcoming holiday season. We know that the IBA Annual Conference week is a very busy week, and we are therefore all the more grateful for you taking the time to meet us. We believe we share with you the common feeling that this year’s IBA week was especially rewarding partly due to the two-year break caused by the pandemic but also due to the prevailing global circumstances.

Many of you may be familiar with our tradition of having a couple of topics that we address every time we meet with another firm during the IBA Annual Conference. This year the themes were:

1.  Growth areas that you have identified for your firm and
2.  The role of ESG matters in your firm’s offering

After some very intensive and highly scientific statistical processing, we have been able to summarise our main findings as follows:

As far as the first question regarding the growth areas is concerned, technology (including biotech and digitalisation in general) was the highest growth area followed closely by areas such as energy, renewables & infrastructure, and M&A (industrial and financial sponsor backed).

As far as ESG is concerned, the comments we received were quite diverse, but the pie chart below, which is aggregated from a few differently phrased comments, may give something of a summary.

Quotes received on the topic varied from “we are conducting due diligence” and “we are following the market but have not committed to any special measures” to “ESG is everywhere” and “we have made an ESG partner”.

With this, thank you once again for great discussions. We hope you have a productive end of the year, relaxing holidays, and a prosperous new year 2023.

Hoping to be able to catch up with you soon and in any case at next year’s IBA Annual Conference in Paris.

Best regards,

THE HANNES SNELLMAN IBA TEAM