IEM Finance conducted the 23rd online annual survey of French primary dealers’ (SVTs) clients from 8 September to 26 September 2025. Its aim is to assess the quality of commercial relationship and services provided by primary dealers to their clients, as well as clients’ views on the functioning of the French government debt market.
In 2025, 202 investors, representing a total of 143 institutions (Asset Manager, Banks, Insurance companies...), responded to the questionnaire.
Main results of the survey:
The French government debt market:
Investor satisfaction is very high on the functioning of French government debt market. Among all investors, 96.2% declared to be “satisfied” or “very satisfied.
Liquidity and transparency are still highly valued by investors, who consider these criteria to be important for a sovereign issuer, such as France. They were 88.7% to assess liquidity as “very important” and 74.7 % of them had the same assessment regarding transparency. Next come predictability and innovation, assessed as “very important” by 61.5% and 12.2% of investors respectively in 2025.
Liquidity is considered to be satisfactory (“very satisfactory” or “satisfactory”) by a very large number of investors for BTFs, nominal and inflation-linked OATs. On nominal OATs, almost all investors (97.9%) were satisfied. This proportion for BTFs reached 93.8%. It is on inflation-linked securities that the increase was most significant in 2025 (74.6%, +6 percentage points), narrowing the gap with other products.
Beyond information provided by AFT, a vast majority of investors (88.5%) were “satisfied” by the information received from French public institutions on economic policy and public finances.
A large majority of investors declared that they were “very satisfied “or “satisfied” by the tapping of off-the-run securities. Among investors who expressed their opinion, 94.3% declared to be satisfied.
Investors, who expressed an opinion, declared to be satisfied with the information published on Green OATs at 93.9%.
The Primary dealers - SVTs:
On fixed-income markets overall, the top-five most frequently quoted primary dealers by investors as being their main partner are:
| 2025 | 2024 |
| 1. BNP Paribas | 1. BNP Paribas |
| 2. Barclays | 2. J.P. Morgan |
| 3. J.P. Morgan | 3. Citi |
| 4. Citi | 4. Deutsche Bank |
| 5. Société Générale | 5. HSBC |
On the French government debt market, the top-five most frequently quoted primary dealers by investors as being their main partner are:
| 2025 | 2024 |
| 1. BNP Paribas | 1. BNP Paribas |
| 2. Crédit Agricole - CIB | 2. Crédit Agricole - CIB |
| 3. Société Générale | 3. Société Générale |
| 4. HSBC | 4. HSBC |
| 5. Citi | 5. J.P. Morgan |
For investors, being a primary dealer is still the most important criterion for the selection of an intermediary (the share of investors surveyed who consider this criterion as “very important or important” stands at 76.6 %), followed by the League Table published by AFT at the beginning of the year, which assesses the performance of primary dealers on the primary and secondary markets and in terms of the quality of the service offered (42.4%, increasing by 5.2 percentage points).
Investors also gave their opinion on attention paid to the quality of various services offered by primary dealers:
The quality of pricing remained largely ahead of investor expectations. 93.5% of investors were still assessing it as “very important”.
Information, advice and sales coverage come in second place. Half the investors considered those services to be “very important”.
Lastly, quality of research and back/middle office are tied for third place this year, with 30% of investors considering them to be “very important”.
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