Berlin Hyp is set to launch a second green Pfandbrief next week after today (Friday) completing a roadshow, which head of investor relations and sales Bodo Winkler said revealed a striking deepening of the investor base for such sustainable bonds.

The German lender announced the roadshow on 16 May, with Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole, JP Morgan, LBBW and UniCredit as leads. The deal is expected to emerge after a public holiday in Germany on Monday, subject to market conditions, with an intermediate maturity targeted.

The green Pfandbrief will be a follow-up to the first and only green covered bond benchmark, which Berlin Hyp sold in April 2015, and from the same programme off which it issued a debut green senior unsecured deal in September.

As the roadshow was nearing its end today, Berlin Hyp’s Bodo Winkler told The CBR that the increase in investor interest has been “striking”.

“What you realise is that more and more investors are becoming more and more educated when it comes to green bonds,” he said. “What we have found is that various investors now have at least a soft target for what proportion of their portfolio green bonds should constitute, whereas we didn’t hear the same on the roadshow for the first green Pfandbrief.

“We of course met with investors who we had already seen on other roadshows,” he added, “but there were also completely new ones who hadn’t engaged in our green bond meetings before.”

Speaking at The CBR’s joint conference with the ICMA Covered Bond Investor Council yesterday (Thursday), Winkler noted that the bank has already reached many new accounts by launching its green issues.

“The bank is almost 150 years old,” he said. “There has been plenty of time to invest in Berlin Hyp, to be honest. Apparently, 50 of these investors waited until we issued green.

“That is really one of the very nice outcomes, especially for a bank like ours that relies on capital market funding,” he added. “We are funding 100% by capital markets, so a broadening of the investor base is a value per se.”

Photo: Berlin Hyp’s Bodo Winkler (right) and Thomas Meister on the road; Credit: Berlin Hyp