BNP Paribas

BNP Paribas’s corporate and institutional bank shone in 2015, with revenues up 13.2% compared with the previous year. And while some have criticised the bank for letting its strategy rely too much on competitor retrenchment, BNPP's head of CIB Yann Gérardin said it was already well into its strategic transformation.

Supranational and agency borrowers showed their steel once again this week, printing a series of euro deals in the face of strong volatility.

In early hybrid capital instruments, deferred coupons could be settled by proceeds from the sale of ordinary shares, in a process known as an alternative coupon satisfaction mechanism (ACSM).

Standard Bank is in the market for two loans, a $750m deal for Standard Bank of South Africa and a deal for its Kenyan subsidiary, Stanbic Kenya, according to bankers.

Royal Dutch Shell has cancelled its £10.07bn ($14.56bn) bridge loan, instead opting to pay for the cash element of its $82bn acquisition of BG Group with cash on balance sheet.

Action, the Benelux non-food discount retailer, has allocated its €1.2bn dividend recap and refinancing facilities at an impressive margin in volatile market conditions.

Bpifrance Financement sold a five year €500m bond on Wednesday as a moderate rise in Bund yields suggested calm after a turbulent open to the week.

B&B Hotels, France’s third largest budget hotels group, closed the book for its €339m seven year term loan ‘B’ at a wide price this week, as the European leveraged loan market works through the last of the deals underwritten in 2015.

On Tuesday night the loan market gathered in all its finery to hear the winners of the 13th Syndicated Loan, Leveraged Finance and Private Placement Awards at the Guildhall, in London. The results are below.

Ascential priced its initial public offering on Tuesday, for a deal size of £279.9m. After a rocky first day on the London Stock Exchange, the information and events business finished the day with its shares trading at the exact level at which they had been priced.

BNP Paribas has impressive targets for cutting costs and increasing capital, after outshining some of its major competitors by posting a full year profit. But it needs to tell a compelling story about how it plans to hit them.

Keurig Green Mountain, the US speciality coffee and coffee machine firm, increased the euro term loan ‘B’ tranche of the $6.4bn debt package backing its acquisition by JAB Holding, the German investment group.