Italy

UniCredit issued its inaugural conditional pass through covered bond on Thursday and despite the new structure, the final spread was flat to where it would have priced a deal from its soft bullet programme. The head of group strategic funding emphasised the deal’s rating stability as the key attribute and not its collateral efficiency.

UniCredit has mandated leads for the first deal to be issued off its newly restructured conditional pass through (CPT) covered bond programme, and is expected to launch the deal on Thursday.

The primary market sprang back to life on Tuesday, as covered bonds from lower rated issuers in Germany and Italy attracted books that were many times covered. The successful outcomes illustrated that the market was not concerned about the outcome of negotiations on the extension of the Greek debt bailout or the prospective timing of the first US rate hike.

With investors squealing at this week’s new issues that crunched spreads to record lows, next generation covered bonds could meet the sector’s increasingly desperate need for higher yielding products. Both conditional pass through (CPT) and dual recourse structures backed by small to medium sized enterprise loans or infrastructure projects are under way, bankers report.

UniCredit Italy has mandated leads to market its newly restructured conditional pass through (CPT) Obbligazioni Bancarie Garantite covered bond programme and says that a deal may follow.

The larger than expected quantitative easing programme announced by the European Central Bank on Thursday has turbo-charged the well-established bull flattening trend in covered bonds and trading volumes have tripled from earlier in the week. With the long end of French market now offering a tempting spread to OATs, real money buyers are set to return. And with Bonos and BTPs rallying hard, relative value between covered bonds and sovereigns should soon be restored in the Cédulas and Obbligazioni Bancarie Garantite markets.

Moody’s upgraded 12 Italian and Spanish covered bonds into “Aa” territory after the close on Wednesday, taking the bonds from category 2A to 1B in the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR). Though this should theoretically improve bank demand, last week’s LCR impact study published by the European Banking Authority (EBA) showed most banks had already met their minimum LCR requirement, suggesting scope for an improvement in appetite will be limited.

Covered bond issuers from outside the Eurozone launched deals this week denominated in sterling and Australian dollars. But a bigger proportion were from the Eurozone where borrowers launched deals in the single currency in maturities that ranged from four to 20 years. The transaction were priced generously and enjoyed a solid reception, with central banks taking a back seat.

The European covered bond market kept up its momentum on Tuesday as four euro-denominated deals hit the screens and books were opened on another denominated in Australian dollars. The euro deals all offered a new issue concession of around 5bp and were comfortably oversubscribed.

The European covered bond market got off to an exceptionally strong start on Monday as LBBW, Compagnie de Financement Foncier (CFF) and BBVA launched euro benchmarks across a range of maturities, without a hiccough. The strong start bodes well for Tuesday when several more euro benchmarks including Bank of Ireland and BPER are due.

Mediobanca and UniCredit could see their covered bonds drop to A- after Standard & Poor’s downgraded the Italian government by one notch to BBB-.

This week the ECB scaled back buying in the primary covered bond market and gave the private sector a chance to set the price.