Natixis

French car parts maker Faurecia has gone against the headwinds buffeting the industry, cutting financing costs with its latest refinancing round. A number of other well known high yield borrowers are also rushing into the market before Christmas to switch their higher coupon paper into cheaper alternatives.

Italo, the Italian high speed rail operator, has signed a €1.1bn green loan, in what tit says is the biggest ever product of that stripe in its home market and the largest ever in the transportation sector globally.

The Arab Republic of Egypt had clocked up more than $9bn of demand for its triple tranche bond trade by lunch time on Wednesday.

La Banque Postale shied away from hitting the bottom end of the guidance pricing range for its debut additional tier one (AT1) on Wednesday, after losing about half of its order book during the sales process.

Xiaofei Guo has joined Natixis to support the bank’s green and sustainable deal origination and solutions sales in Asia Pacific.

The European Financial Stability Facility rounded off its 2019 funding programme on Tuesday, but some on-looking bankers remarked that the deal, though fully subscribed, did not reach the issuer's customary high levels of demand. Meanwhile, Erste Abwicklungsanstalt returned to the euro market for the first time since February 2018.

Intesa Sanpaolo and Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen (Helaba) gave investors the chance to put money into preferred senior paper on Tuesday. Both trades attracted chunky order books and gave away a small new issue premium.

Egypt is in market promoting a new deal: three tranches of benchmark dollar funding. Its 40 year tranche will be Egypt’s longest ever deal.

Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten included its environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings in a mandate announcement for its upcoming sustainability bond on Monday, following in the footsteps of KfW which kickstarted the movement with its green bond tap last week.

Two SSA borrowers are coming to the market for euro deals on Tuesday. The European Financial Stability Facility and Erste Abwicklungsanstalt will both print what are likely to be their final benchmarks of the year.

Issuers in the financial institutions bond market do not want to see the chance for cheap funding slip, so more are lining up deals. On Monday, Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen (Helaba) mandated leads for a preferred senior bond in euros, and UK insurer Utmost International said it was aiming for an senior unsecured bond in sterling.

Investors staged a protest over pricing in the non-preferred senior bond market this week, causing one transaction to fail and putting two others at risk of falling flat. Comfortable with their returns for 2019 and happy to be able to choose from a glut of new bond offerings, funds have simply been happy to divert their attention elsewhere. Tyler Davies reports.