NIB is an international financial institution owned by eight member countries: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden
NIB issues 7-year environmental bond. (Credit: NIB.)
NIB returned to the sustainable market by launching a 7-year EUR 500 million NIB Environmental Bond (NEB), due April 2027. The proceeds from this transaction will be allocated to a separate portfolio for onward disbursement of loans to selected sustainable projects in the Nordic–Baltic region.
The transaction is NIB’s first Environmental Bond issue of 2020. The proceeds of the bond will be used to finance selected projects that are assessed to benefit the environment and to contribute to resilience and climate change mitigation in NIB’s member countries.
The final order book came to above EUR 2.9 billion, meaning the deal was almost six times covered. This is the largest order book ever achieved for an Environmental Bond benchmark. Strong demand underpinned by a high quality order book largely dominated by central banks, official institutions and ESG real money accounts led to a final spread of MS + 2 basis points.
“The demand for NIB’s new environmental bond benchmark was again strong with more than 100 investors for a record high of nearly EUR 3 billion in orders in the book. We highly appreciate the strong investor support and see this as recognition of the high level of transparency, careful selection of eligible green projects and best in class impact reporting for NIB Environmental Bonds”, says Jens Hellerup, Senior Director, Head of Funding and Investor Relations at NIB.
“NIB Environmental Bonds combined the strong credit strengths of NIB and the certainty that the funding is used to support sustainable environmentally-friendly projects in the Nordic and Baltic regions. NIB is one of the early pioneers of the Green Bond market and provides extremely high standards for its green use of proceeds and reporting. We were happy to be able to participate in this new NEB offering”, says Lars Dreier Kristensen, Senior Portfolio Manager at ATP.
Over 100 investors were involved. In terms of geographical breakdown, the Nordics made up 20%, Benelux 12%, and the rest of Europe 42%, while Asia had a strong contribution with 26%.
Asset managers and pension funds were the largest investor component with 36%, followed by central banks and official institutions with 35% and banks with 28%.
Source: Company Press Release