Nationwide Building Society took Eu1.4bn of orders for a Eu1bn seven year issue yesterday (Monday), and an official at the issuer pointed to the size and granularity of the order book, outside CBPP3, as highlights of the trade, which it was keen to complete before possible market saturation.

Three other euro benchmarks were launched yesterday, with LBBW, Banco Santander Totta and Banca Carige also in the market, and bankers described the demand received by Nationwide as particularly impressive given the competing supply.

Leads Barclays, Deutsche, HSBC, Nationwide, and Société Générale launched the UK issuer’s Eu1bn seven year trade with initial price thoughts of the 22bp area, before moving to guidance of the 20bp-22bp area on the back of IOIs in excess of Eu1bn. The order book closed at Eu1.4bn with the re-offer fixed at 20bp over.

“We are very happy with this outcome,” said a funding official at Nationwide. “We knew the market had been difficult recently, so we are very pleased to get a high quality order book that is quite sizable relative to many recent deals, especially as we don’t have the ECB’s help.”

Banks bought 53% of the deal, fund managers 28%, central banks and official institutions 16%, and insurers and pension funds 3%. Some 39% went to accounts in Germany and Austria, 22% to the UK and Ireland, 17% to the Benelux, 7% to Asia, 6% to France, and 5% to the Nordics.

“We got good distribution across bank treasuries and asset managers as well as across jurisdictions,” said the funding official. “We feel the granularity was particularly good.”

The funding official added that Nationwide had targeted printing either a Eu750m or a Eu1bn deal, but would likely have been able to increase the size to Eu1.25bn on the back of the demand it received.

“However, we’ve accessed the covered bond market a few times already this year, so Eu1bn was perfect for us,” he said.

The deal is Nationwide’s third euro benchmark of the year, with the issuer also selling a £750m three year deal in April.

The funding official said that Nationwide had been monitoring the market for around three weeks, intending to get a deal done before it enters a blackout period at the end of October.

“Whilst we didn’t have an absolute need to get funding through the door we were keen to get a deal away, and after monitoring the market last week we believed that conditions would be constructive this morning,” he said. “We were also aware there has been a fair amount of covered bond supply with possibly more to come, so we wanted to get a deal in before the market became saturated.”

The funding official said Nationwide was aware that other issuers would be active on Monday before deciding to launch its deal.

“It was a busy day in the end but I don’t think there was anything directly competing with us,” he said. “So while there was a lot of noise out there we were confident that with the price we went out with we’d be able to build a good order book, and that proved to be the case.”