BMW issued the largest unsecured MTN of the year on Wednesday — outstripped in size only by a €700m privately placed covered bond from UniCredit, according to Dealogic. The trade was BMW’s largest since 2016.

The first bond from the UK’s five year old Municipal Bonds Agency will be launched in the next week or two and, thanks to some tweaking of the agency's operating practices, more are set to follow, writes Lewis McLellan.

Few MTN issuers have so far issued in the Libor-replacing euro short term rate (€STR) format, with deals limited so far to supranationals, agencies and, this week, a sub-sovereign. Some bankers blame the 2017 EU Prospectus Directive for tightening up the rules on adding new indices to programmes, leaving non-exempt issuers on the sidelines.

Swedish issuer Kommuninvest is preparing to launch its first deal of 2020 — a five year Swedish krona note.

Barclays put a senior medium term note banker at risk of redundancy on Friday. The bank will hand the reins of its MTN business to a more junior banker in its Paris office.

The World Bank made its first visit to the Rwandan franc market last week, place what Dealogic indicates is the first deal in the currency since 2015.

AIIB made its dim sum debut this week into a booming market. A slew of deals has been sold in recent weeks, with more paper printed in last the last 10 days than in the whole of any other year, except for 2019.

US food group General Mills sold €200m of short dated notes on Wednesday, in its first sole-led deal since 2017.

KfW, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and, in the medium-term note (MTN) market, a German region and a Finnish agency have kicked off the Norwegian krone market for SSAs. Bankers are hoping to extend krone’s impressive form from last year into 2020.

MTN bankers are tipping Formosa and senior non-preferred debt for big things in 2020. Both markets, along with MTNs as a whole, have had an underwhelming year as issuance failed to live up to the promise of a busy 2018.

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are increasingly moving into local currency funding. Now medium-term note (MTN) dealers need to dust off their EM currency investor Rolodexes, as this shift offers a much-needed business opportunity for them.

Specialisation could define MTNs in 2020 as the market looks to differentiate itself from public markets where borrowers are easily executing large, cheap, liquid benchmarks. MTN dealers’ change of focus is shaking up the league tables. Frank Jackman reports