With an incredible breadth of product and continuous innovation, Société Générale (SG) wins The Banker award for the fifth year in a row.
“We grew even quicker than our main competitors because we have all segments, including structured products, in all key regions with critical ties everywhere – and we continue to develop the most advanced innovations,” says Christophe Mianné, global head of equities and derivatives.
Mr Mianné is particularly proud of a couple of products, one of which is a strategy that offers hedge funds a new way to benefit from implied volatility. “We are well known among the hedge fund community because we offer the right product at the right moment,” he says. “We believed so much in this product that we gave the staff the opportunity to invest in it.”
Another successful innovation is the Timer Call, which SG defines as the “new vanilla call”. Instead of fixing the maturity of the option and letting the volatility float, the product fixes the volatility and lets the maturity float. The volatility used is the implied volatility, allowing the product to be cheaper than a vanilla call and optimising market timing.
In a well-developed equity derivative market, where structured products are already widely used, SG says the plan is to expand the reach of the equity derivatives industry. “One element of our expansion strategy is geographic; the other will involve [continuing] to open our proprietary platforms to our clients,” says Mr Mianné.
