Société Générale

ING Bank and Société Générale announced roadshows for forthcoming senior green bond transactions this week, as the asset class showed signs of playing a more familiar role in banks’ funding plans.

Life is not getting easier for the treasury teams of financial institutions and the investors that buy their debt. Much of 2015 has been dominated by volatility, with the euro market shut for long periods of time.

Insurance professionals are used to uncertainty. It’s their business. But even they are worried about the uncertainties they face under new regulations about to go into effect, over which there is still a significant lack of clarity.

Predicting the future, especially in banking, is a fool’s game. Only this time, seven years on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it is becoming increasingly obvious — thanks to regulation and technology — what banking will look like in 2020. Owen Sanderson reports.

It’s not just financial institutions wrestling with extra layers of regulatory complexity. As the banking system moves from bail-out to bail-in, the buyside is finding it increasingly difficult to make investment decisions. What do investors really think about bank debt? Tyler Davies reports.

Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, has covered its IPO, which is set to raise at least €1.4bn, on the third day of the bookbuild.

Just four months after its inaugural covered bond, Singaporean lender DBS is once again looking to venture into the market, mandating four banks to run a series of investor meetings. But rather than targeting the same investor base, the issuer has set its sights on a sterling-denominated trade.

The Republic of Cameroon is embarking on a roadshow in Europe and the US on Thursday.

A rare public sector issuer from the eurozone periphery could bring some euro supply late in the year after hiring banks on Tuesday to run an investor roadshow.

Snam, the Italian natural gas transmission company, priced a €750m eight year bond on Tuesday, its first issue since it was added to the list of bonds that the European Central Bank will buy as part of its public sector bond purchase programme, or quantitative easing.

Russian steelmaker Evraz has been in talks with banks for a syndicated loan for some time, but bankers said this week that the firm will likely stick to bilateral loans instead.

The Export-Import Bank of Korea (Kexim) timed its first outing to the offshore bond market after a sovereign rating upgrade perfectly. This time around, the Korean policy bank kept money on the table to woo US investors rather than relying on strong onshore demand to be aggressive with pricing.