France

French railway operator SNCF Réseau has more than doubled the length of its outstanding maturity curve with a century long medium term note.

Natixis has appointed Pascal Soldaini to a CEEMEA focused position in its global infrastructure and projects business.

Covered bond issuers have provided more than €7bn of supply this week after a moribund spell, proving themselves to be more nimble and opportunistic than perhaps ever before.

Time is up for the covered bond lemmings. They’ve had it too easy for too long. Gone are the days of pricing a covered bond exactly where your neighbour wished they had printed theirs. Issuers need to be nimble and bankers insightful.

Rating: A2/A/A

Verallia, the French glass bottle maker, started sounding investors on Thursday for an €860m-equivalent bond to finance its acquisition by alternative investment fund Apollo Global Management.

Santander Consumer Finance and Société Générale both opted for defensive three year senior unsecured trades on Thursday, the first euro benchmark FIG deals in three weeks.

Greek parliament gave bankers the result they were hoping for on Wednesday night, providing strong market conditions for two well established eurozone issuers — Commerzbank and BPCE — to issue five year bonds, taking a combined €1bn in the covered bond market. Sizable orderbooks and minimal new issue premiums proved that the market is very much in full operating mode.

French financial institutions and corporates have been quick to jump at the funding opportunity offered by the offshore RMB bond market. Despite the line-up of success stories, however, French asset managers feel the market has some way to go before it comes of age.

Banque de France (BdF) is working with the financial sector to ready the market for the China International Payment System (CIPS) launch later this year, and has told GlobalRMB that the progress of the RMB means that inclusion in the IMF's SDR basket is simply a matter of "when and how".

Caisse Française de Financement Local proved the resilience of the covered bond market on Thursday by printing the first euro deal from a European issuer in three weeks. The defensive three year tenor was exactly what the market needed, according to rival bankers, and paves the way for more short-dated euro issuance.

It's been a good week for Europe's renminbi ambitions with the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe) extending a Rmb50bn RMB qualified foreign institutional investor (RQFII) quota to Hungary, while China Construction Bank (CCB) listed its RQFII ETF on Paris’ Euronext.