Lead Underwriter

Lead underwriter

The head of a syndicate of financial firms that are sponsoring an initial public offering of securities or a secondary offering of securities. Could also apply to bond issues.

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Lead Arranger

In investment banking, an underwriting firm that leads a syndicate. A syndicate is a group of underwriters responsible for placing a new issue of a security with investors. Every syndicate is a temporary arrangement. The lead arranger assigns parts of the new issue to other underwriters for placement and usually takes the largest part itself. It is also called a managing underwriter or a syndicate manager or, less formally, a book runner.

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lead underwriter

The main underwriter of a new security issue. The lead underwriter forms a distribution system to sell the security issue and is generally responsible for the largest part of the offering. Also called house of issue, managing underwriter.

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Lead underwriter. When a company wants to raise capital by selling securities to investors, it partners with an investment bank, known as the lead underwriter.

That bank has the primary responsibility for organizing and managing an initial public offering (IPO), a secondary stock offering, or a bond offering.

In the case of an IPO, the lead underwriter agrees to buy some or all the shares from the company and helps it determine an initial offering price for the security, create a prospectus, and organize a syndicate of other investment banks to help sell the securities to investors.

In return for assuming the financial risk of the IPO, the lead underwriter receives a fee, which is usually a percentage of the price of each share of the IPO.