1/26/2026
Last week, it was hard to have your attention on anything other than the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Whether it be speeches from President Trump, Canada’s PM Mark Carney, or NATO’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte or California’s Governor Gavin Newsom. The message all of them ironically seemed to share was that the world was changing, or had changed dramatically in recent months. And with it, so too must Europe.
In terms of how all this trickles down into European securitization, I think there are two distinct channels. The first is short-term market impact.
With Domivest’s arrival late on Friday the first euro trade in the pipeline since VCL 47, the journalist in me had until then feared it was a market hunkering down, preparing for the storm ahead.
But the capital markets seem to have come to the conclusion that all manner of posturing can take place before they need react. As if to say that until the thing which fills newspapers actually happens, we can and must, as the Brits say, keep calm and carry on.
And so, when it comes to deals this week, expect the euro pipeline to continue as normal. 2025 was a monster year of issuance, so issuers can afford to take their time.
Indeed, it is normal for sterling issuance to start a couple of weeks ahead of euros.
The second channel is regulation. In the past few years, I’ve reported on how reform of the EU’s Securitization Regulation and Solvency II are part of the EU’s response to Brexit and the changing politics of America. If there is now more clearly a “new world order”, Europe’s financial ecosystem must become even more competitive than originally planned.
Many close to politics believe securitization reform is a low-hanging fruit in this equation. One that can be much more easily changed than say, the Savings and Investment Union or plans for a single supervisory body.
Nevertheless, it may still be unlikely that political events of the past few weeks lead to a further recalibration of SecReg, but I would not rule it out. At the very least, events at Davos make the road for reform even clearer than it might otherwise have been.
But this is all hypothetical. For now, I too should keep calm and carry on with the week’s events!
While euros has broadly remained in hibernation, sterling is off to a flyer.
Indeed, it’s only €700m (equivalent) away from matching 2025’s Q1 total of €4.3bn. With over two months left to play, too.
Needless to say, for all the reams of stories written on Greenland, Davos et al. the only one that really matters in UK securitization is how firmly it has become a seller’s market. Blackstone and Mileway’s £500m CMBS Sirius Logistics 2026-1 was a great example of that.
Unlike its cousin in the US, UK CMBS is not a behemoth asset class that can just waltz out there and print when it likes. It’s a firmly esoteric asset class, but such is the power issuers wield right now, Mileway was able to open with punchy IPTs.
That did little to deter hungry investors, throughout the cap stack. Coverage was strong throughout, and gave leads the confidence to tighten from IPTs. In the end, Sirius Logistics finished 3bps inside the December CMBS from DBMS on the AAAs and 5-10bps inside across the rest of the stack.
Meanwhile, Atom Bank priced its latest Prime RMBS, Elvet Mortgages 2026-1, 12 months after its last new issue. While placing just £346m is invariably easier than the £1.25bn from Santander the week before, it’s still impressive to see the AAAs land just 1bps wide of the shorter dated, £500m tranche from Holmes.
Another sign that sterling investors are more than comfortable to keep up the pace. Finally, JP Morgan returned via LendInvest and MT Finance with its latest BTL RMBS from the Pierpoint shelf – the £312m Pierpoint BTL 2026-1.
Clearly, the odds are in the issuers favour, but JP Morgan came out with tempting IPTs with the AAAs offering a strong pickup versus the latest Vida Bank trade.
This approach proved effective with initial book updates showing healthy to bumper demand across the structure, even before full account participation had come through. As books matured, coverage continued to build, allowing the leads to tighten guidance across all rated tranches.
By launch morning, demand had strengthened sufficiently to support pricing at levels that ultimately delivered some of the tightest sub-AAA BTL prints seen since 2022, underscoring the depth of demand despite lingering geopolitical “noise”.
That’s all from me this week. I leave you with the knowledge that I have never felt more (positively) masculine after my front door lock jammed on Tuesday night.
ChatGPT tried and failed to help me, but in the end I realized the outside door knob was partially blocking a full closure. I unscrewed that, but to my dismay nothing changed.
So, I did as all men do in such situations: I kicked the door a few times as hard as I could – and hey presto, the door was open and I was officially a man. Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.
Enjoy your week,
Tom
© 2026 ARC Risk Models Limited
