Santander

Supply and demand for senior financial institution bonds was lukewarm this week, as issuers and investors favoured higher yielding products amid healthy market conditions. FIG deal arrangers are predicting that the trend is set to continue and that issuers will favour capital trades.

Mediobanca has been speaking with a 'high' number of investors in the euro market this week, as it gears up to sell the first ever deal from its green and sustainable bond programme.

Activity in the financial institutions bond market has picked up this week after a long pause in euro supply. Danske Bank and Belfius Bank were among the names looking to capitalise on the improving market conditions on Wednesday.

Great Portland Estates, the UK real estate investment trust, has sold £150m of US private placements.

Spain’s Sonnedix, a solar power producer, has signed bank facilities totalling €154m, a day after Moody’s said sustainable project finance has a lower default risk than its conventional equivalent.

Spanish telecommunications infrastructure company Cellnex has finished its €4bn rights issue to fund further M&A opportunities, with an extremely high oversubscription.

Citi has taken market share from other banks in the past year to become one of only four that account for 60% of all secondary market covered bond volume traded on Bloomberg so far this year, thanks to a combination of devoting balance sheet to trading and having the appetite to take risk.

Six months after joining JP Morgan, William Vereker has been named as the next non-executive chair of Santander UK.

A glut of syndicated loans has been signed among European high grade borrowers that are for general corporate and refinancing purposes — a sign, said loans bankers, that the market is returning to business as usual for the rest of the year, marking what will at least be a change from the frantic emergency capital raising which began in spring.

The Loan Market Association is not looking at producing documentation for social revolving credit facilities, adding to the likelihood that the first-of-its-kind Covid-19 facility for Suez last week will remain a rarity in the market.

Suez, the French utility, signed what it claims to be the first ever social revolving credit facility, using elements of green and sustainability-linked financing to create a new Covid-19 era structure to mitigate some of the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

European Banks are seeing a rebound in their common equity tier one capital ratios in the second quarter, as they draw on new measures of regulatory relief to guard themselves against a tougher operating environment.