SEB's Green bonds

SEB has issued a Green Bond of 500 million euros.

On Friday 10th February 2017 Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) successfully issued its inaugural EUR 500m (no grow) 5yr Green Bond. On the transaction SEB acted as Sole Structuring Advisor and Joint Lead Manager together with ABN AMRO and HSBC. The Green Bond was priced at a spread of MS+20bps off an order book in excess of EUR 2.1bn.

The mandate announcement was released on Wednesday 1st of February and on the following week between the 6th to 9th of February a roadshow was arranged where the issuer met with numerous investors in Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Stockholm and London as well as hosting a global investor call for investors unable to attend the roadshow.

The final order book was very granular with broad participation across Europe. Investors from Germany and Austria (26%) took the largest share of the book, followed by investors from Benelux (20%), Nordics (19%), France (19%), UK/Ireland (10%), Switzerland (3%) and other geographic regions (3%). 

In terms of investor segments, 45% of the transaction was placed with asset managers, followed by 35% to pension/insurance funds and 20% to banks.

About Green Bonds

In a world with ever-increasing awareness on climate concerns, the Green Bond raises industry engagement by encouraging investments in sustainable projects, processes and technologies. It does so with a transparency that allows investors to understand the challenges and solutions and thus diversify risk.

SEB is recognized as a pioneer in the Green Bond market through a close collaboration with The World Bank in 2007/2008 in the creation of the first World Bank Green Bond - which was the start of institutional investors’ activation of mainstream portfolios for climate investments.

It’s a simple model: proceeds from companies and organisations that issue Green Bonds are allocated to eligible Green Bond projects according to pre-defined criteria, verified by environmental specialists. Transparency is guaranteed through regular reporting of the Green Bond projects.

Reference projects

SEB will on an annual basis publish a Green Bond Investor Letter on the investor relations pages of its website (www.SEB.se) that will contain (i) information on issued Green Bonds, (ii) a description of the allocation of proceeds for each category of SEB Eligible Green Loans (including project examples where customer approval for publication has been obtained) and (iii) the total amount of disbursed funds. SEB encourages its customers to perform impact reporting and intends to include details of such customer impact reporting in the Green Bond Investor Letter where applicable.

Reference projects of eligible assets