The Euromoney/EBRD/ECBC CEE Covered Bond Forum 2017 | Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC | London, UK

Euromoney is delighted to announce the return of its CEE Covered Bond Forum, co-hosted with the EBRD and the ECBC, on Tuesday May 23rd in London. Last year’s debut event attracted 100 issuers, investors, authorities and regulators.

The recent debut benchmark covered bonds from issuers in Poland and Turkey were resounding successes. Investors, starved of yield in the more traditional covered bond markets, flocked to the new issues, rapidly getting comfortable with the new structural and legal features they ensured over-subscribed books and a highly attractive cost of funding for the issuers.

But these transactions are the tip of the iceberg. Regulators in many countries in the Central and Eastern European region are concerned about the reliance of their banking system on both foreign parental funding and retail deposits – sources of funding that are vulnerable to the ever more frequent systemic shocks. Seeing the appetite of western European investors for these debut deals, several countries in the region are either writing covered bond laws from scratch, rewriting existing but unused laws to make them viable, or upgrading their existing laws to make them compatible with best practice in more established markets. There are at least six jurisdictions in the region that have either just passed new laws or are actively working on them.

At the same time the new EBA guidelines and the possible Covered Bond Directive will make it both easier and more necessary to upgrade covered bond laws in the existing markets.

Andras Simor, Senior Vice President , Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, European bank for Reconstruction a development (EBRD)