Sweden

Trading levels given are bid-side spreads versus mid-swaps and/or an underlying benchmark and bid-yields from the close of business on Monday, March 8. The source for secondary trading levels is ICE Data Services.

This week's scorecard looks at the progress Nordic agencies have made in their funding programmes in early March.

Swedish Export Credit Corporation on Thursday became sold the third three year dollar deal by a public sector borrower in as many days, showing ample demand for the short end of the dollar curve.

Tryg Forsikring found strong demand for a new restricted tier one (RT1) bond in the Swedish market on Wednesday, as it looked to optimise its capital structure in preparation for the purchase of RSA Insurance Group’s Nordic businesses.

A pair of sovereigns privately placed century bonds this week, with one of the borrowers — Ireland — dipping below the 1% point for the first time at this sort of tenor.

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.