“league tables are rankings of Investment Banks in terms of the dollar volume of deals they work on. New standard league table sessions in compliance with 2004 league table criteria for Debt, Equity, Syndicated Loans, Project Finance and M&A are currently available. Notice that this is revenue and dollar volume of securities issued (in underwriting) or transaction size (in M&A), not profitability.

League tables are used in two contexts: either in promotional materials or client pitches produced by an investment bank, or tabulated by a financial information tool, such as mergermarket, Dealogic, Thomson Financial or Bloomberg.

When used in bank-produced materials, the company is always in control of deciding how to tabulate each table and which ones to show to customers. Banks naturally never show unflattering league tables, so one rarely sees league tables where the firm is not in the top 3. Banks seeking to enter a new space may show two tables side by side from the previous and the current year to show how they have improved. As mentioned above, the details of how each table was calculated are essential to understanding how much these tables have been tweaked.”

**Source: Wikipedia Thomson Financial League Tables background information**