Covered Bonds

Deutsche Pfandbriefbank (PBB) has announced a tender offer for up to €250m covered bonds. Like Berlin Hyp, it has ensured that the affected deal will remain at benchmark size, but, in contrast to its peer, it is not planning a replacement issue.

The European Covered Bond Council has updated its harmonised transparency template to include a new tab that tracks mortgage loans that have been granted a payment holiday due to the impact of Covid-19. Credit rating agency analysts welcomed the move, but said there is still a question over how loans will perform after payment holidays end.

Achmea Bank issued the first conditional pass-through (CPT) covered bond since October 2019 on Tuesday with the juicy spread ensuring the most oversubscribed order book ever for this structure, enabling the deal to be priced flat to fair value.

The coronavirus crisis may have hit overall covered bond supply prospects, but it has provided a silver lining for some banks — such as Credit Suisse, ING and Commerzbank which have all fared well in the covered bond league tables this year.

LBBW printed the first Pfandbrief since the onset of the coronavirus crisis with a deal that was priced flat to fair value. The high level of demand suggested good scope for the bond to perform and showed that investors are ready to buy, even though the deal was priced tighter than German Laender bonds — which is very unusual.

Berlin Hyp has launched tender offers on four of its euro covered bonds in an effort to optimise its funding costs and provide liquidity to investors. The issuer also plans a new long dated covered bond.

Rating agency Scope beat many European agencies to the punch in adopting new covered bond rating methodology in 2015, which is today considered a standard approach. But the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma) is fining the agency on the grounds that it failed to apply it consistently and with the regulator’s permission.

Covered bond spreads look set to keep tightening, particularly German Pfandbriefe, said market watchers. And even though covered bond purchases under the European Central Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (Pepp) have so far proved rather limited, some bankers believe this buying may increase as the institution announced a bigger than expected increase to the scheme on Thursday.

Barclays was positively surprised at how quickly capital markets reopened and it wasted little time issuing senior and tier two deals while its treasury team were still working from home. The UK lender is likely to use the Bank of England's Term Funding for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (TFSME) facility, which will lower its secured funding needs. The bank was well capitalised going into the crisis and has buttressed itself against the expected tide of credit impairments with a prudent level of provisioning.

Investors were eager to buy a euro benchmark seven year covered bond from NordLB Luxembourg on Wednesday, enabling the bonds to be priced flat to the issuer’s curve. That illustrating the strength of demand in what one lead manager described as a “hot” market.

Spanish house prices fell for the first time in four years in the first quarter this year, but even so, the Cédulas market is in a much stronger position to weather further expected falls than it was when house prices dove in 2007 and 2012. And based on the recent performance, even if spreads were to widen, some investors would be likely to consider the move as an opportunity to buy.

Nordea has made extensive use of Nordic currency covered bond markets through the coronavirus crisis and, as spreads have stabilised, has selectively issued senior preferred deals across a broad range of other FX. The bank says it has plenty of time to meet its regulatory funding needs and has no imminent plans to issue subordinated debt given the recent relaxation of capital requirements.