Whether you’re a C-Suite level executive or a small business owner, your day planner can quite literally burst at the seams at any given moment.
You’re concerned with mergers, bottom lines and most importantly, your people.
Perhaps there’s not enough time in the day to read all the financial sections or get up to speed with what happened in Asian markets last night.
No problem.
CIBC Capital Market’s Vancouver-based desk solutions provide a full suite of hedging and risk management solutions across interest rates, foreign exchange (FX) and commodities to help clients effectively manage and mitigate exposures.
CIBC is the only big five bank with local FX and interest rate coverage, allowing its team members to work more closely with clients.
This team of experts provides timely market insight, efficient execution for spot FX needs and a full suite of products and solutions to assist clients of any sort through a simple phone call or click.
For clients looking for advisory and tailored hedging solutions, calling into the desk is best. For those looking for transactional FX spot and hedging, CIBC’s FX Online platform is the optimal route.
“Connectivity is huge at CIBC, and we pride ourselves on working closely with our banking partners, including commercial and investment banking in Vancouver,” says Arezou Bahari, CIBC Vancouver’s executive director and team lead for the cross asset desk.
“This helps our team build deeper relationships with clients to truly understand their needs, allowing us to help clients by creating customized risk mitigation solutions, for FX, interest rate or commodity-hedging exposure.”
CIBC Vancouver’s client base is primarily commercial banking and corporate banking clients who have existing relationships with CIBC. However, it also covers clients who don’t have CIBC as their primary banking partner, but still do their FX hedging through CIBC’s desk.
As soon as a client borrows from a bank, they’ll have exposure to interest rates and will need to decide whether to hedge the exposure or not. These are conversations that CIBC facilitates with its banking partners and clients.
When a CIBC Capital Markets team member first meets with a new client, it’s important to review their existing hedge policy, if they have one. If they don’t, CIBC provides guidance on building one and can even provide sample hedge policies. Once team members get a solid grasp on which solutions the client wants to enter, it is their job to help execute the trade. Over time, CIBC team members like to re-evaluate how the hedge has done and modify the strategy if need be.
“We spend time asking questions and probing to then understand what the real exposure is,” Bahari explains. “We are dealing with very smart people, but a lot of times, they’re not spending that much time on FX, and we help them identify their risks. We don’t want to jump into any solutions before we really understand what the core underlying risks are.”
CIBC’s team members also help clients fix their exposure to interest rates, thereby reducing the risk of unfavourable movements in rates. By using market-traded instruments - interest rate swaps - to fix clients' interest rate exposure, CIBC can design highly customizable and cost-effective solutions to match almost any interest rate exposure a client may have.
And more recently, with the spike in commodity prices, CIBC has also been providing commodity solutions. The underlying concept is similar: identify the risk, assess how material it is and whether it makes sense to hedge it. Once a client decides to hedge it, CIBC guides them through what percentage to hedge out on different terms and what solutions to use for the different buckets.
CIBC has clients who hedged 10-year loans 3% lower than where prevailing floating rates sit today and have locked it in for 10 years.
CIBC’s commitment to excellence also includes outside-the-box solutions and best-in-class advisory on current market trends: a daily note summarizing relevant market activities and noteworthy headlines, along with quarterly hedging seminars that provide clients with market updates and hedging how-tos.
“Our desk is client centric and relationship-focused,” Bahari says. “ Every day we help our clients navigate volatility in the markets, and over a longer period of time, our job is to help our clients with their overall hedging strategies. ”
To learn more, visit cibccm.com/en/expertise/global-markets/mid-market-solutions, or email Arezou Bahari at [email protected].
