On Wednesday, NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank issued a EUR 500 million covered bond under Luxembourg law (lettres de gage publiques). This is a transaction of NORD/LB Luxembourg S.A. Covered Bond Bank (NORD/LB CBB), a wholly-owned subsidiary of NORD/LB which is currently the only issuer of lettres de gage benchmark bonds. The issue has a term of four and a half years.
After the subscription register opened, the target volume of EUR 500 million required for a benchmark was reached and even substantially exceeded within an hour. At closing, buy orders for over EUR 1.4 billion had been received from over 110 investors. “After the recent successful increase in our 10-year Pfandbrief, strong investor demand for our lettre de gage shows that we are able to place significant issue volumes with investors, including international ones, even in a relatively difficult environment,” noted Dr Hinrich Holm, NORD/LB board member responsible for the bank’s capital market business.
The issue was set at EUR 500 million, with a coupon of 0.25%, 15 basis points above the relevant mid-swap rate. The covered bond has the value date 23 February 2017 and ISIN XS1569741884. The rating agencies rate the security AAA (Fitch) and Aa1 (Moody’s).
Overall, the order book has investors from 15 countries, with a very high regional distribution. Over half the issue was placed in Germany. The largest share of the bond (43%) was sold to banks, followed by fund managers (30%) and central banks (16%).
About NORD/LB
With total assets of EUR 178 billion, NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank is one of Germany's leading merchant banks. Its core business segments include structured finance in the energy and infrastructure sector, ship and aircraft finance, corporate client business, commercial real estate finance, capital market business and private and commercial client business. The bank has headquarters in Hanover, Braunschweig and Magdeburg as well as offices in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Munich, Schwerin and Stuttgart. Outside Germany, NORD/LB is active in Luxembourg with a covered bond bank (NORD/LB Covered Bond Bank) and also has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Shanghai.
