Europe
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Two insurance firms, Vivat and CCR Re, announced mandates for the rare restricted tier one (RT1) instrument this week, with the expensive product keeping space free in other capital buckets under Solvency II requirements. -
The tone in Europe’s corporate bond new issue market continued to strengthen on Thursday, as two issuers came to market and achieved strong sales, despite a wider market that worsened during the day.
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Public sector borrowers had one of their busiest weeks of the year in sterling, with a supranational trade in particular getting a strong reception. More could follow next week, with demand strong from Asian investors, said bankers.
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The Basque Government this week gave one of the best signs that investor worries about Italy’s political situation are unlikely to spill over to other countries as it printed a three times subscribed debut sustainability bond.
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Four Pfandbriefe got traction this week but the limelight was stolen by Commerzbank which issued its fourth covered bond of the year, its largest in four years and its first with a five year tenor since 2015.
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Danske Bank entered the market on Tuesday, selling $1.75bn of senior non-preferred debt across three tranches, in its third transaction in the format in the space of less than a month.
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LBBW and the Stuttgart Stock Exchange have created a Schuldschein digital technology platform called Debtvision, with all the grand ambition and fanfare that Helaba exhibited when launching its rival VC Trade system in March. Whether the town is big enough for the both of them remains to be seen.
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The cloud that has lingered over the European IPO market since Easter abated slightly this week as a number of deals progressed quickly during bookbuilding.
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SFIL followed KfW into a reopened dollar market this week with only its second ever dollar benchmark, while engaging in a bit of price discovery that leads said was “spot on”.
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Netcompany, the Danish IT service firm, which priced its Copenhagen flotation on Wednesday, saw its share price rise by 29.6% on its first day of trading.
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Slovakia, Croatia and Romania dived into the primary bond market this week — all keen to take advantage of what has been by recent standards a rare period of market stability to print.
