The Netherlands

Standard & Poor’s and Fitch have both assigned top ratings to NIBC’s conditional pass-through covered bond. The issuer has privately placed a small amount of bonds and is expect to publicly distribute them, according to S&P.

ABN Amro returned to the covered bond market on Thursday with its first deal of 2013, a €1.5bn 10 year. After being out of the market for just over a year, the borrower attracted a comfortably oversubscribed order book in a very short time span, underscoring a much greater depth to the market than ANZ’s recent funding appeared to suggest.

Bankers have played down fresh reports of Dutch government plans to set up a mortgage financing agency to fund low risk mortgages. The topic has been under discussion for some time and the final outcome remains uncertain, bankers told The Cover on Thursday.

The Dutch arm of BNP Paribas Personal Finance will begin a roadshow next week for its second ever publicly sold RMBS.

Santander UK has announced a new deal from its Holmes master issuer RMBS shelf. The prospective deal is likely to offer a significant spread pick up compared to UK covered bonds. And Rabobank has privately placed RMBS issuance from its Obvion subsidiary.

ING priced its tightest ever covered bond this week —inside the French sovereign curve. It demonstrated deep demand at the long end despite low yields, said bankers.

ING Bank offered buyers a rare bite of Dutch covered bond supply on Wednesday and launched the country’s first euro benchmark in nine months.

Dutch bankers have hit back at suggestions that the local regulator’s increased focus on encumbrance is behind a fall in covered bond issuance. The obsession with covered bond encumbrance does not give a true picture, they told The Cover this week.

High redemptions, combined with deleveraging and a drive towards deposit funding has put net first quarter covered bond supply in 2013 on track to hit record lows, said Barclays analysts on Thursday.

Fitch placed SNS Bank's mortgage covered bonds' AA+ rating on Rating Watch Evolving (RWE) on Wednesday, a day after revising its outlook on Netherlands from stable to negative. Despite this, SNS bank’s covered bonds have rallied strongly since last Friday and have the potential to perform further.

ING’s head of long term funding Martin Nijboer told The Cover the issuer’s inaugural dollar covered bond was an easy decision as there was a good window to pre-fund for 2013. The $1.5bn 10 year was a strong statement as a debut trade, but rivals in the market questioned whether it was priced too generously.

Standard & Poor’s has dealt a blow to the Dutch covered bond market by downgrading several of its banks’ issuer ratings, chiefly because of the country’s prolonged property market correction. But the move should only have a limited effect on the Dutch covered bond market, say analysts.