Prime Brokerage Market Share
A Brief Overview of Industry Market Share
A
good read titled "Battle of the Bulges" pointed out that competition for gaining prime brokerage market share is growing fiercer with more than $11 billion in expected hedge fund revenues in 2008, a 15% increase over 2006 (reported by
TABB Group). The fight for market share is even more intense among the industry's top players.
For years the prime brokerage industry has been dominated by three firms—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bear, which collectively owned about two-thirds of the market. As of year-end 2006, the Lipper HedgeWorld prime brokerage league table ranked Morgan Stanley first (with 23% of the market and $153 billion in assets), followed by Bear (21%, $136 billion), Goldman (18%, $119 billion), UBS (7%, $47 billion) and Credit Suisse (4%, $25 billion), in terms of market share based on assets.
As Bear collapsed in March 2008, and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs struggle to maintain their dominance in the industry, other major financial services firms are stepping up their prime brokerage efforts, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas. JPMorgan Chased was only ranked eighth in the Lipper survey with just a 2.3% market share, now it is given a quick entry into prime brokerage as long as Bear's hedge fund clients are successfully locked down. BNP Paribas bought Bank of America's equity prime brokerage division that was ranked the sixth-largest in the country by assets at the end of 2006 by Lipper HedgeWorld, thus was instantly made one of the largest prime brokers in the U.S.
The recent turbulence in the prime brokerage industry also accelerated the trend of hedge funds moving away from replying on just one prime broker. Traditionally hedges funds are unwilling to switch prime brokers or increase the number of their prime brokers (TABB report). As Michael Guarasci, partner at hedge fund Indus Capital Partners said, "We have long-standing relationship with our prime brokers, so if a new company wants to come in and do business with us, it may not get anywhere because we're pretty happy with our service. It's not easy to switch prime brokers." (full article). Now more and more hedge funds are adding prime brokers to limit counterparty risk since the fall of Bear (ref). This created considerable opportunity for new players to enter or existing players to take a bigger piece of the market share, as pointed out in an article by Merrill Lynch: "The multi-prime broker environment overcoming the challenges and reaping the benefits" (download the pdf).
Guest post by Yifei Huang
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Prime Brokerage Market ShareTags: Who holds the most prime brokerage market share, prime broker market share levels, prime broker rankings, market share of prime broker, market share of prime brokers
FinAlternatives just released a prime brokerage survey, it contains some interesting details on how satisfied hedge funds are with their prime brokerage service providers. The survey digs into the quality of capital introduction, execution and personal service received from their prime broker. What is interesting was that 38% of hedge fund Manager respondents noted that their prime broker's capital introduction capabilities were non-existent or very weak. Another interesting point was that poor personal service was the #1 reason that a hedge fund manager would switch prime brokers.
