Many bankers in the syndicated loan market are optimistic about the number of deals being prepared for launch in the coming months, GlobalCapital understands.
"There's definitely a lot of deals in the pipeline," one Dutch banker told GlobalCapital. "Things are really picking up again from September, especially in the commodity market."
Syndicated loan volumes this year stand at $490m across EMEA, a little under this time in 2020, where the volume was $496m, according to Dealogic data.
"I think, in September, there will be more things coming in," said a banker at a French bank. "We know on our side it feels like a normal level of activity coming in, more like a typical September. We are all coming back into the office, getting up to speed, and so are our clients."
"We have lots of transactions in the pipeline right now, and I think we'll be more and more busy until the end of the year," another German banker said. "We're also looking at more event-driven financing, particularly for mergers and acquisitions." The banker added that he expected the ECB's targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs) to also boost lending to corporates.
The longer term view was less rosy for some: "We have seen probably the busiest time of all time in the first half this year, in terms of new issuance," a German banker said. "It's fair to say it's no longer a banking market, particularly in leveraged finance.
"In a nutshell, as long as the shadow banking sector is unregulated, they can do what they want," he continued. "These funds are so big, and so powerful, they can easily replace what banks used to be for. For us, there are very few advertised opportunities, they are massively oversubscribed, the pricing can be horrible."