Sweden

Cint, a digital market research company, has priced a Skr5.96bn ($720m) IPO on Nasdaq Stockholm, the largest new listing on the exchange this year.

The depth of demand for financial institutional funding in the domestic Scandinavian currency markets was illustrated this week with a series of covered bonds and subordinated new issues.

Nykredit Realkredit is expected to open order books for two Swedish krona covered bonds on Thursday with a combined value of about €2bn, including one secured on green mortgages.

Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT), a Swedish entertainment company that operates video streaming and television services, completed a Skr4.35bn ($523m) capital raise on Wednesday evening and attracted enough investor demand to price a larger deal than originally intended.

Achmea has become the latest Dutch bank to transition to a soft bullet maturity. This will have a material impact on central bank treatment and funding, but opportunities to extract value in the secondary market will be a challenge.

Swedish bankers have argued that proposed amendments to the country's covered bond law, which bring it into line with the EU's Covered Bond Directive (CBD), must demand that liquidity buffers in soft bullet bonds cover interest payments during any 12 month extension period, as opposed to covering interest and principal for 180 days — a standard more commonly seen in hard bullet maturities.

KfW and Swedish Export Credit Corporation (SEK) achieved strong results in sterling on Tuesday despite extremely volatile conditions in the currency as a result of uncertainty around the impact of Brexit and the rising cases of coronavirus in the UK, which has affected swap spreads and the cross-currency basis swap for non-UK borrowers.

Expected euro denominated covered bond supply from the Nordic region looks promising with Norway likely to prove a particularly bright spot. However, more cost-effective domestic funding in the Swedish market is expected to depress euro volumes there.

Kommuninvest, the Swedish local government funding agency, is hoping to issue its much delayed debut green bond in euros next year after initial plans to bring the deal this year were put on hold.

This week's scorecard looks at the progress Nordic agencies have made in their 2020 funding programmes in mid-December, with some issuers also setting their targets for 2021.

The Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, is adding a “negative screening” process to its purchases of corporate bonds under its quantitative easing programme, meaning it will no longer buy the bonds of the most polluting companies.

Italy returned to the private placement market to print one of the year’s largest MTNs on Thursday. The deal stood out this week, since issuance in the market has started to wind down ahead of Christmas.