Are pure hard-bullet jurisdictions becoming a rarity?
Extendable maturity structures should now be on the lips of all investors. Covered bond jurisdictions in which
only hard-bullet covered bonds are issued are rare in the meantime. A glance at the iBoxx € Covered benchmark
index reveals that Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and Spanish single cédulas are now exceptions. In
all other jurisdictions, soft-bullets, or to some extent conditional pass-through covered bonds, are now quite
normal. And in the last 12 months, we have seen several further developments.
A comparison of maturity structures at the end of April 2015 with the previous year shows that the proportion
of extendable structures has risen by nearly 5% to 37.5%. There were major shifts especially in Switzerland,
the Netherlands and France with soft-bullets. In case of CPTCB structures with Unicredit SpA and Van Lanschot,
two new issuers entered the market and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena proposed the conversion of its softbullet
programme to conditional pass-through.