The bond was launched at a spread of 115bp over mid-swaps, down 10bp from guidance, when the size was fixed at €600m.
Demand had reached €3.5bn by the end of the trade.
Barclays, BNP Paribas, JP Morgan, NatWest Markets, UniCredit ran the transaction on behalf of Bank of Ireland, starting with price thoughts of 145bp area.
The bonds have a five year tenor, with a call option for the issuer after four years, and are expected to carry a credit rating of Baa3/BBB-.
A banker close to Bank of Ireland’s deal suggested that it had been the most subscribed deal in the FIG market on Monday, with concurrent trades from Banque Fédérative du Crédit Mutuel and NIBC also in the market.
“Fair value is debatable, given that we need to assess where the price of the call is,” the banker said. “Even though there have been three callable transactions in the last three weeks [in euros], the market in callables in non-UK and non-US is scarcely populated, but I would say that fair value is somewhere in between 118bp and 121bp.”
He said that the main accounts that normally buy into financial institutions’ bonds had demonstrated interest in the trade, explaining the strength of interest in the trade.
Bank of Ireland first established a holding company in 2017, with a view to using the entity to issue senior and subordinated debt that can count towards the minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL).
In 2018, it completed a series of transactions from its holdco totalling about €1.2bn, as part of plans to fulfil an MREL target of €13.3bn by January 2021.
The holdco was last in the market in August 2018, when it sold its debut holdco senior unsecured bond for €750m at a spread of 115bp.