Norway

Investor demand for Møre Boligkreditt’s five year covered bond issued on Wednesday was well in excess of the deal size — even though the negative yield of minus 0.269% means they are bound to lose money if they hold it to maturity.

SR Boligkreditt attracted robust demand for its first green covered bond on Tuesday, enabling the bonds to be priced with a minimal concession.

Scatec Solar, a Norwegian solar power generator, raised Nkr1.3bn (€132m) of growth capital in a share sale on Tuesday evening amid rising investor demand for renewable energy assets in Europe.

Sparebank 1 Østlandet priced €500m of debt in senior preferred format at a spread of 67bp over mid-swaps this week — 8bp tighter than the initial price talk. The issuer is not a frequent visitor to the primary market, so it had to pay a higher premium than other borrowers, according to a banker away from the deal.

This week's scorecard looks at the progress Nordic agencies have made in their 2019 funding programmes by the middle of September.

Sparebank 1 priced a seven year senior preferred bond in green format on Wednesday at mid-swaps plus 65bp. The €500m bond attracted demand of €700m but leads were not able to tighten pricing to the full extent of their ambitions.

Raiffeisen Bank International sold a tier two bond this week, tightening pricing by 40bp. The trade was supported by hefty investor demand of €2.7bn, more than six times the deal's €500m size.

Credit Suisse was marketing a 10 year bullet senior bond on Tuesday, avoiding negative yields by choosing a tenor longer than seven years. At the same time, Sparebank 1 announced it was readying its green debut in senior format.

Kommunalbanken brought its green bond framework to the Swedish krona market for the first time last week to place its seventh green note, its first since August 2018. The move into the currency follows a wider trend of major SSA issuers funding in niche currencies as raising debt in core markets becomes harder, according to bankers.

KfW brought its revamped green framework to the Norwegian krone market to print a deal on Tuesday. Later that week, strong demand from domestic and international investors let the issuer increase the note to a record breaking size, printing the largest Nokkie green bond across any asset class.

Sparebanken Vest (SparVest) on Thursday became the fourth Norwegian bank to publish a green bond framework and one of the first to publish a framework that is aligned with the European Union’s proposed standards for green bonds.

Volumes are growing across the spectrum in the Scandinavian MTN markets, as issuers and bankers return from their summer holidays. Meanwhile, bankers are expecting Scandinavian investors to move further out along the credit curve in response to negative yields as dovish Nordic central bank tones could lead to a bullish Scandinavian market.