The Norwegian Covered Bond Council has become the first national industry body to publish a national template for reporting of covered bond and related data in response to the ICMA Covered Bond Investor Council’s transparency standards initiative.

The template was published on the website of Finance Norway (FNO) on Monday, and is accessible here:

http://www.fno.no/en/main/covered-bonds/cbic-european-transparency-standards/

FNO representatives met with the CBIC in November to discuss the transparency standards before releasing the template.

“This will be the template for the Norwegian issuers when they publish their quarterly results,” Stein Sjølie, senior advisor at FNO, told The Covered Bond Report. “When the CBIC proposed this in the first half of last year, we thought it was a good idea, so we set up an internal group to put together a template according to their guidelines.

“We have now done so, and the next step is for individual issuers to produce their reports in accordance with the template, although they may not be all ready to publish everything at this stage.”

Kristian Fiskerstrand, funding and risk management at Norway’s Terra BoligKreditt, said that the issuer has already been moving in the direction of the CBIC’s guidelines in its cover pool reporting and that it would continue to do so.

“We definitely welcome the CBIC initiative,” he said. “We also want to be as transparent as possible because of our double-A rating and we are happy for investors to look into our quality.”

Fiskerstrand noted that issuers would be seeking to keep the format of the template close to how they reports data to the rating agencies.