Deutsche Bank

A healthy euro benchmark pipeline is building for next week, with one supranational looking to print and a pair of sovereigns believed to be considering deals, after a week that didn’t finish as strongly as it started for core issuers.

KfW raised €3bn with a slow burning seven year benchmark on Thursday, leaving SSA bankers wary about the threat of over saturation in the currency as several issuers mull deals for next week.

Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has completed a Sr7.75bn ($2bn) package of loans by signing a $1.4bn three year revolving credit facility in London this week.

Allocations are out for a $145m loan backing the Blackstone Group’s acquisition of Serco’s business process outsourcing assets in India.

Wednesday brought red back to equity traders' screens after a buoyant Tuesday, but trading action confirmed the satisfactory execution of this year’s first two substantial equity capital markets deals in Europe: the €1.03bn block trade in NN Group, the Dutch insurer, and French aerospace firm Safran’s €650m convertible.

Bank restructurings come in two flavours — the kind where the business stays pretty much the same, and the kind where it doesn’t. 2015 was the year of the latter, as new chief executives, new business models and a pervasive sense of existential doubt hung over investment banking. Owen Sanderson reports

Blockchain, the technology underlying bitcoin, is coming to a back office, and clearing house, and bank, and front office near you. Instead of one authority keeping records, everyone will. That’s the idea, anyway, of a wave of start-ups rushing to build workable applications. How will clarity emerge from this ferment, and just how will it change the business of capital markets? Jon Hay reports.

Corporate issuers now dominate Europe’s high yield market, but investor appetite is showing signs of its old fickleness. As Victor Jimenez reports, issuers can still depend on the market, but may have to pick their windows carefully in 2016.

Investment grade loan pricing has stopped falling — meaning the flow of refinancing deals is ebbing. Mergers and acquisitions, as ever, are what banks want, and they are confident of getting more in 2016. But will banks finally get round to weeding out unprofitable relationships? Rob Cooke reports.

Investors see equity-linked debt as combining safety with upside in a happy medium. But for issuers, the product is offering happy extremes: super-high premiums, ultra-low coupons and even no equity risk. Jon Hay reports.

The Inter-American Development Bank is the latest issuer to enter a red hot dollar market, after KommuneKredit and the Asian Development Bank raised money on Wednesday.

The World Bank printed a five year Kangaroo note on Wednesday to kick off the Australian dollar market for the year, which could be set for a bumper couple of months.