The underwriting business provides a window into the changing landscape in the $39 trillion U.S. bond market. Much of the shift started with banks’ retrenching after new rules forced them to pare back risk in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

They cut thousands of jobs, leaving fewer veteran traders and bankers on bond desks, and, in the process, became less active in day-to-day market transactions. That often left their old clients, the money managers, to try to trade directly among themselves.

The push by fund managers into underwriting was a direct result in part of this Wall Street scale-back: If it’s going to be this difficult to locate and buy high-quality bonds in the secondary market, the thinking goes, then get them right from the primary source -- when they’re issued.

Over time, “banks started to lose a connectivity to these money managers,” said Michael Henderlong, who runs Babson’s capital markets group. “It gets to the point where the dealers have a tough time accessing all the different parts of the asset managers.”

AllianceBernstein Hire

Henderlong joined Babson, the $217 billion investment management firm that’s part of the MassMutual Financial Group, in 2013 after spending more than a decade at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., two of the top ten underwriters in the U.S. corporate debt market. This month, Babson added John- Michael Chadonic, who’d previously worked at Bank of America Corp., to support the capital markets team by helping it understand who owns what and who’s selling what on Wall Street - - a task the biggest dealers once did.

At AllianceBernstein, which oversees $500 billion of assets, money manager Michael Sohr is responsible for holding constant talks with corporate-bond issuers and banks about new debt sales in the works.

Getting in Early

Once a sale is agreed upon with a company, a bank is found to distribute the bonds that the money manager won’t keep. Sometimes the transactions are private placements destined for only a handful of buyers; other times they’re broadly distributed.

“We want to get in there early and help structure it the way we want to,” said Gershon Distenfeld, who’s director of AllianceBernstein’s high-yield team. “Sourcing bonds had become increasingly important as it relates to the primary market.”