The same bond could cost two hundred times more to issue in one market than in another.
Across twenty-five markets that each counted cost their own way, the charges that most deterred issuers stayed hidden.
Location / capital-markets photographyThe EBRD’s work on local capital markets kept hitting the same wall. Would-be issuers and the investors who might buy from them complained that the fees to issue, list and trade a bond, and the delays that came with them, were high enough to deter them entirely, and a real brake on markets that needed to grow. The exchanges and regulators who set those fees did not accept it. Neither side could prove its case, because the cost of a bond transaction had never been measured in a way that let one market be set against another.
Fees were structured differently everywhere, much of the evidence was anecdotal, and no authority knew how its own charges compared with the market next door. The EBRD asked us to end the argument with evidence: to measure the true, all-in cost of issuing and trading debt across twenty-five of its markets, on one comparable basis, and rank them.
- Benchmarking
- Framework development
- Tool & model building
- Market & landscape analysis
- Regulatory & legal analysis
- Trend analysis
- Interviewing
- Surveys & questionnaires
- Desk research
- Recommendation & roadmap design
- Executive & board-grade communication
- Synthesis & report writing
- Verification & triangulation
- Stakeholder validation
- Financial modelling
- Knowledge-product & toolkit creation
ClientOne method. Twenty-five markets.
The costs weren’t simply high. They were invisible.
Every market built its fees differently: some flat, some scaling with the size of the issue, some capped and most not, each layering issuance, listing, trading, settlement, safekeeping and tax charges in its own way. There was no common yardstick to hold them up against, and that incomparability was the real barrier. It let issuers’ complaints stay anecdotal, easy for a regulator to wave away. It meant no authority knew whether it charged far more than the market next door, so none felt any pressure to change. It also hid the biggest culprit of all: the approval fees a regulator itself levied on a prospectus, which scaled with the size of the issue and, left uncapped, could dwarf every other cost.
Nothing pressures a market to cut a cost that cannot be compared. The task was not to argue that fees were too high. It was to make them comparable, because comparison was the thing that would move them.
How we pulled it together
We built the engine that made unlike markets comparable.
Twenty-five markets price a bond issue twenty-five different ways, so a raw fee table tells you nothing. We ran every market through one standardised model issuer and portfolio, turning each tangle of charges into a single indexed score that could sit beside any other.
We found the culprit, not just the symptom.
Costing a small issue and a large one separately exposed fees that scaled with issue size and never met a cap. Broken into its parts, the regulator’s own prospectus-approval fee proved the largest single charge in most markets.
We took the market’s word over the regulator’s.
Published timelines were only the starting point. We ranked on what issuers actually lived: where Egypt’s regulator put approval at five days, participants said thirty, and thirty is the figure we used.
We reported it so no authority could look away.
The headline was a public league table ranking all 25 markets by total cost of use. Beneath it sat a factsheet for every market, laying its own costs out line by line: comparison and country detail in one deliverable.
We built it to keep working after we left.
The framework was fixed and indexed so the same issue could be re-costed years later, and rerun across other EBRD regions without a rebuild. A durable yardstick, not a one-off snapshot.
What we delivered
A cross-market cost benchmark turns on two things: that every market is measured in exactly the same way, and that the numbers reflect what each market actually charges, not only what its institutions publish. This team was built to hold both.
The measurement was built and owned in-house. Thierry Clarke created the original scoring methodology and ran its expansion to twenty-five markets, keeping a bespoke framework from drifting as it reached less familiar ground. Patrice Archer, whose ground is the mechanics of debt issuance and trading, designed the framework with him so it captured the costs that actually bite. Every market’s figures passed back through Thierry for review, so a single judgment sat behind the whole ranking rather than twenty-five separate ones.
The numbers themselves had to be drawn out of the markets, not off a desk. Tsvetelina Zapryanova ran the coordination and liaison across all twenty-five markets, reaching the regulators, exchanges, depositories and participants whose real charges and lived timelines the study turned on, with a group of graduate analysts compiling what came back.
