HSBC’s sales of French and Canadian businesses have progressed, with HSBC SFH (France) becoming CCF SFH as acquiror My Money Group rebrands itself, and RBC gaining regulatory approval to buy HSBC Canada. Laurentian covered meanwhile withstood an issuer cut last month with a higher asset percentage.

My Money Group – managed by Cerberus Capital Management – announced that its long-planned acquisition of the retail banking activities of HSBC Continental Europe (HBCE), including HSBC SFH, was finalised on Monday.

HSBC SFH has been renamed CCF SFH, with the acquiror renaming itself CCF Group, having also entered into a long term agreement with HBCE to rent and use the historic Crédit Commercial de France brand. CCF SFH will be a subsidiary of the group’s retail banking Banque des Caraibes entity, which is being renamed CCF.

The group already has its own covered bond issuer, MMB SCF, named after parent My Money Bank, a speciality finance subsidiary.

Moody’s on Tuesday withdrew its Aaa rating of the transferred covered bonds, citing business reasons, while S&P affirmed its AAA ratings but revised the outlook from stable to negative, reflecting its negative on CCF’s BBB- rating and that there are no unused notches of uplift to support the covered bond rating in case of a negative rating action on the parent bank.

Royal Bank of Canada meanwhile on 21 December received ministerial approval to proceed with its acquisition of HSBC Canada, with the deal expected to close in the coming months.

Also last month, Morningstar DBRS (rebranded from DBRS Morningstar as of Tuesday) confirmed its AAA rating of Laurentian Bank covered bonds.

It had on 30 November placed them on review with negative implications after having done likewise with the bank’s A (low) long term issuer rating. However, a mechanistic downgrade of the covered bonds would only have followed an issuer downgrade of two or more notches, and a downgrade of only one notch, to BBB (high) ensued.

The rating agency had said the AAA covered bond rating could withstand a one notch downgrade if covered bond programme overcollateralisation (OC) was increased to a level where the cover pool credit assessment (CPCA) is triple-A, and when confirming the rating on 15 December, Morningstar DBRS cited an OC level of 22.0% (based on an asset percentage (AP) of 82.0%) to which it gives credit, up from a 15.0% level (based on an 87.0% AP as at 31 October) cited on 30 November.