Westpac

There is a growing pipeline of subordinated bond issuance in the FIG market this week, as issuers think about their regulatory requirements and find no reason to wait in light of a recently favoruable backdrop.

Australia’s Vicinity Centres, a real estate investment trust, issued a €500m bond on Monday, slipping into what is expected to be a week of weak activity before the high grade bond markets light up again next month.

Japanese Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG), the holding company for SMBC, returned to Australian dollars on Wednesday after two years away from the currency.

Corporate, FIG and SSA issuers placed floating rate notes this week, pegged to Euribor, Sonia and Libor. With so many issuers coming to market, bankers are interested to see which other borrowers 'take advantage of the liquidity'.

Fresh from the announcement of a new stimulus package by the European Central Bank last week, investors stormed into the euro public sector bond market on Tuesday, led by KfW and Bpifrance. The latter printed €1.25bn, equaling its biggest ever single issue. The strong momentum is set to continue with a string of mandates, including two supranationals for Wednesday.

FIG bond bankers are worried, as one put it, that “the steam is coming out of the Kangaroo market” after Thursday’s additional tier 1 (AT1) deal from Société Générale failed to reach the heights of deals from UBS and BNP Paribas earlier in the summer.

Westpac placed just under HK$13.4bn into the Hong Kong market across two MTNs last week — the pair of bonds are its largest ever in the currency, according to Dealogic. The notes came in a busy week for niche issuance, and bankers have posited that this move into the peripheral markets comes as a response to the global fall in yields.

Issuance is starting to resume after the summer break; however, this week a booming public market drew away investor and issuer attention from MTNs. Despite this, a range of established SSA, FIG and corporate borrowers have slipped in, with deals across core, niche and EM currencies.

Market participants expect more banks will now want to print Kangaroos after investors on a search for yield poured into UBS's additional tier one (AT1) deal on Tuesday. The syndication, which surprised those involved after it managed to shave 75bp off its initial pricing guidance and attract A$4bn ($2.71bn) of orders, suggested a market ripe for a deal spree.

Korea Development Bank moved to place the largest Korean Kangaroo earlier this week, a note that was also priced more tightly than any other Korean-issued Aussie dollar deal.

Lloyds Banking Group has returned to the Aussie dollar market for the first time since May 2018, offering investors the chance to invest in two tranches of senior debt at the operating company level. The issuer follows a wave of European and UK financial institutions making their way down under.

India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp has launched a $500m loan into general syndication to pay back a bond maturing this year.