Loans and High Yield

Hong Kong-based WeLab is set to dip its toes in the Asian syndicated loans market for a $50m borrowing, potentially fuelling a trend of fintech start-up lenders hitting the wholesale market for funds.

State Bank of India (SBI) succeeded in pricing the first offshore Basel III additional tier one (AT1) offering from an Indian name this week, but a bullish pricing strategy meant orders were muted and it has struggled in secondary. Despite the glitches, many believe the deal has set an important benchmark, writes Addison Gong.

Winsconsin’s Spectrum Brands, the consumer products conglomerate ended a two day roadshow on Wednesday with the sale of euro notes that will repay dollar bonds, an uncommon transaction in the euro market.

Ardian and Tikehau both announced the closing of €4.5bn and €610m direct lending funds respectively this week, with Tikehau's private debt fund manager Jean-Baptiste Féat telling GlobalCapital that 2016 seemed to be one of its "best years".

Debt collector Lowell GFKL — formed by a merger between the UK’s Lowell Group and Germany’s GFKL Group in late 2015 — hit the road to entice investors into its floating rate notes, which it will use to add a third company to the group, Germany’s Tesch Inkasso.

Repricings are bubbling up across the levloan market as two firms, one Austrian and one US, launched repricing requests on Wednesday following SIG Combibloc's lead.

TMF Group, the business services provider based in Amsterdam, and Unilabs, the laboratory services firm from Geneva, have both launched loan refinancing packages with TMF holding bank meetings last Friday in London, Unilabs on Thursday.

A former managing director at Goldman Sachs has joined Nomura as a managing director in its leveraged finance division.

US coatings maker Axalta on Tuesday sold a €450m bond to redeem its 2021 euro notes, a month after it redeemed its 2021 dollars, cutting its coupon by 200bp.

A jumbo bond intended to refinance the debt of merged companies Quintiles and IMS on Wednesday added to a deluge of high yield issuance, with the market seeing €4bn of new bonds by Thursday.

The European high yield market looks bound to end the third quarter of this year with a flourish as the volume of September primary sales approaches the €10bn mark, some €2bn more than for June and July combined.

State Bank of India launched the first-ever offshore Basel III compliant additional tier one (AT1) bank capital offering from an Indian name on Wednesday, a deal market participants expect to set the pricing benchmark for future Indian lenders from this asset class.