Europe

Hypo Noe and Prima banka Slovensko competed for investors’ attention with similar sized covered bonds in the same seven year tenor on Tuesday. The Austrian transaction was priced with barely any concession and the higher rated Slovakian transaction was the first debut deal to price with a negative yield and the first from Central and Eastern Europe with a negative yield.

Norbert Doerr is set to leave his position as head of capital management and funding at Commerzbank, after 12 years working within the German lender’s treasury team.

Natixis has become the first bank to introduce a green weighting factor to its internal capital model, so that the way it prices loans is skewed to favour environmentally sound assets and disadvantage polluting ones. The ground-breaking move brings to fruition an 18 month project and anticipates what some believe may one day be demanded by regulators.

Shanghai-based China Pacific Insurance Co (CPIC) has received the green light from its board to list in the UK using the London-Shanghai Stock Connect, becoming only the second Mainland company to do so.

The Province of British Columbia has weathered volatility from the fallout of last week's meeting of the US Federal Reserve to return to the dollar market for the first time in four years. Another rare SSA issuer, IDB Invest, also plans a return to the dollar market, with investor calls set up for this week ahead of its five year debut.

Lead managers had to step in to help Nederlandse Waterschapsbank (NWB) raise €500m with a 15 year water bond on Monday, though a banker on the deal said that there had been strong demand for the transaction from ESG investors.

UK tour operator Thomas Cook’s default could come close to annihilating the bondholders’ positions, leaving them only with a few cents on the euro, the liquidation analysis shows. The 178-year-old company tried feverishly to secure a £1.1bn rescue package over the weekend but collapsed on Monday.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has made a pair of senior appointments within its European Union equities business in Paris.

Société Générale has reshuffled its equity capital markets team, moving multiple managing directors to new roles.

Kaspi.kz, the largest payments company in Kazakhstan, announced on Monday that it would proceed with an IPO on the London stock exchange after filing a registration document last week.

Sparebank 1 Østlandet priced €500m of debt in senior preferred format at a spread of 67bp over mid-swaps this week — 8bp tighter than the initial price talk. The issuer is not a frequent visitor to the primary market, so it had to pay a higher premium than other borrowers, according to a banker away from the deal.

Hypo Noe Landesbank fuer Niederoesterreich und Wien (Hypo Noe) has mandated lead managers for a seven year public sector backed covered bond.