Europe Financial Bond House: Barclays
360-degree player
This year presented FIG issuers with ample opportunities but, against a volatile market backdrop, also no shortage of risks. For demonstrating leadership and vision to steer issuers away from pitfalls and towards historically impressive achievements across all asset classes, Barclays is IFR’s Europe Financial Bond House of the year.
Be it capital, senior unsecured funding or covered bonds, Barclays is ever-present in the component parts of the European FIG debt capital market. And in 2025 everything came together for a stellar year.
That is shown not just in league tables, though Barclays did climb several places in the FIG capital and overall euro FIG leader boards in 2025, but especially in the roster of deals that put the bank at the forefront of reopening markets, spotting trends and identifying opportunities.
“The 360-degree view we offer clients in this space is unrivalled,” said Mark Geller, global head of banks, DCM, at Barclays. In a year marked by geopolitical uncertainty and trade volatility, that allowed the bank to show “the greatest consistency of leadership”, said Geller.
Take the Additional Tier 1 market, which Barclays reopened on multiple occasions. Barclays was the only bank on both trades that reopened the euro AT1 market in May and lifted the asset class after its lowest point of the year, namely the volatility unleashed by the US administration’s tariff announcements in April.
After seven weeks without euro AT1 supply, in which demand had been slower to recover than other asset classes, Barclays guided Erste Group Bank and Sabadell to success with two €1bn trades that attracted more than €11bn of combined orders at yields that were little changed from before the volatility. Two days later, the bank reopened the sterling AT1 market with a £1bn note from Barclays itself, securing the bank its tightest sterling AT1 reset spread.
In a year in which issuers compressed AT1 spreads to levels not seen for several years, Barclays was a lead manager on the three tightest euro deals. The trades from UniCredit, CaixaBank and BBVA reflect not only the popularity of Spanish and Italian FIG credit, but also the depth of Barclays’ coverage in the region. Indeed, the bank led six of the seven euro AT1s priced in the IFR Awards period from Spain, the market’s busiest jurisdiction.
While looking back on the year gives the impression that demand for higher-yielding assets was a constant, to capture the strongest bid took a keen sense of timing. That was demonstrated by Barclays in May when it led AXA into a market upswing triggered by a delay to US tariffs on the EU to execute a relatively rare multi-format dual-tranche transaction. The French insurer offered investors €2bn of Tier 2 and Restricted Tier 1 paper and was rewarded with €10.3bn of demand, driving tight pricing.
The strength of Barclays’ franchise was also demonstrated by its record in crossborder execution as opportunities opened for global issuers to secure diversification at attractive funding costs.
Barclays was at the forefront of guiding foreign issuers into European markets, bringing a host of issuers from Asia Pacific to the euro market and topping the table for reverse Yankee supply.
The bank is also a champion of the rapidly growing funding agreement-backed notes market, an increasingly competitive field. It led multiple deals for regular clients as well as rarer offerings, such as the euro debut of Pricoa Global Funding, and unusually long 10-year deals for Athene in sterling and Global Atlantic in euros. Barclays was sole bookrunner on the latter, taking down the risk and then selling it into the market within a couple of basis points of its estimates.
Barclays’ multifaceted platform also helped issuers to maximise opportunities closer to home. 2025 saw the culmination of several recovery stories for issuers or jurisdictions that had in the not-so-distant past struggled with market access. Barclays delivered historically attractive funding costs from a €500m four-year covered bond for Portugal’s Novo Banco, to a €600m 6.25% perpetual non-call eight AT1 from Eurobank that is one of the tightest Greek AT1s.
In the covered bond market, Barclays showed its valued leadership, whether in pioneering a new product in a debut buy-to-let mortgage covered for Paragon Bank or in reviving supply of sterling covereds from non-UK issuers. Supply dried up completely for months after an ultimately reversed regulatory announcement from the Prudential Regulation Authority that would have excluded such bonds from UK bank treasuries’ LCR portfolios.
Doubts about the market persisted until, with Barclays as a lead, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce took the plunge in September with a £1.25bn three-year and came away with more than £3.1bn of demand.