Fidelity Investments Partners With BrokerDealer Credit Suisse for IPO Deal Flow

Fidelity Investments and investment banker/brokerdealer Credit Suisse have formed a partnership that gives Fidelity’s retail brokerage clients access to participate in initial public offerings and follow-on equity offering underwritten by Credit Suisse. The partnership opens up IPO investing for customers of Fidelity’s registered investment advisor (RIA) network, its family office clients and its retail brokerage customers who qualify.

For Credit Suisse, the arrangement opens up its potential investor base to a wide arena of new customers. “It gives us the ability to distribute shares into the mass market that we didn’t have before,” David Hermer, Credit Suisse’s head of equity capital markets for the Americas, told New York Times DealBook.

About 232 companies have gone public so far this year, nearly 79 percent more compared with those in the period a year earlier, according to data from Renaissance Capital. By Mr. Hermer’s reckoning, the I.P.O. surge is still only in its early stages.

Credit Suisse completed 63 book-run IPOs in the first half of 2014, its most active half-year period on record. For that period, Credit Suisse ranks number two for IPOs in the U.S. and in the EMEA area–Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Looking ahead, Credit Suisse is working on several high-profile deals, including the much-anticipated IPO for Chinese internet company Alibaba.

And, the thinking goes, the more companies that Credit Suisse helps take public, the more that Fidelity customers benefit. The IPO participation is open to Fidelity investors with a minimum of $500,000 in retail assets.

BrokerDealer Credit Suisse Back in the IPO Business

Brokerdealer.com/blog news extract below courtesy of  June 10 WSJ and reporters Telis Demis and Evelyn Rusi

The chinos are gone. So is the sprawling Silicon Valley hub.

facing eastBut more than a decade after its fall from the peak of the dot-com-banking business, Credit Suisse Group AG CSGN.VX -0.33% is at the helm of some of the sector’s biggest deals.

The bank is one of the lead managers of the expected $20 billion-plus initial public offering for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the Chinese online shopping and e-commerce giant.

Credit Suisse also helped lead IPOs for Weibo Corp. WB +1.39% , which operates a Twitter TWTR +2.61% -like service, and online cosmetics retailer Jumei International Holding Ltd. JMEI +0.82% , earlier this year.

Credit Suisse’s climb back in tech banking began with a Starbucks SBUX -0.77% -fueled brainstorming session in 2010 between Jim Amine, the firm’s global head of investment banking, and David Wah, global head of technology banking Continue reading