Covered Bonds

Aareal Bank issued the longest dollar Pfandbrief benchmark from a German issuer since 2016 flat to fair value and in good size on Wednesday. The transaction provided a statement of confidence in the credit, following its recent profit warning.

UK mortgage lender Perenna has completed its first round of private funding and plans to return for more within the next few months, before originating fixed for life mortgages in the second half of the year. That could lead to the first Danish style covered bond issuance in the UK.

After launching its first euro covered benchmark earlier this year, Aareal Bank returned on Tuesday to mandate leads for a dollar Pfandbrief.

Investors clamouring at a chance to diversify helped Argenta Spaarbank’s debut benchmark euro covered bond price close to where bonds from established Belgian issuers trade when it was issued on Tuesday.

UniCredit’s decision to align the definition of a defaulted receivable mortgage loan with the issuer's internal classification will have a negligible impact on the quality of the cover pool, said Moody’s.

Bankers said that they were hoping for an event to activate covered bond issuance, following January’s 66% year-to-date supply slump versus 2020. Banks' senior issuance was also surprisingly low, but has more chance of higher volumes in future.

Belfius Bank took advantage of a quiet market to issue a seven year senior preferred transaction on Monday which attracted exceptionally strong demand from bank treasuries buying for their liquidity portfolios, where demand competes with negative yielding covered bonds.

Amendments to the German covered bond law, which are expected to be signed off within the next few months, contain key details on how soft bullet extensions will be triggered, the interest rate that is applied in such an event and the size of the liquidity buffer required.

Swedish bankers have argued that proposed amendments to the country's covered bond law, which bring it into line with the EU's Covered Bond Directive (CBD), must demand that liquidity buffers in soft bullet bonds cover interest payments during any 12 month extension period, as opposed to covering interest and principal for 180 days — a standard more commonly seen in hard bullet maturities.

Covered bond spreads are so tight that asset managers with strict mandates to invest only in this asset class, such as Union Investment in Germany, have limited room to extract relative value and post a better performance than the main indices. And unlike last year, when falling interest rates boosted absolute returns, the rates outlook is less certain.

UK covered bonds are trading close to where they would be expected, given their new regulatory treatment outside the European Union. And while euro supply prospects this year could improve on last year’s paltry sum, the vast swathe of bonds redeeming in the same period translates to a technical imbalance which will support spreads.

Argenta Spaarbank has mandated leads to issue its debut covered bond deal. The mandate follows the National Bank of Belgium's decision to grant it a covered bond licence, taking the number of issuers in the country to five, boosting the prospects for supply this year.