It looks like third time lucky
The international capital markets have long been the natural arena for Australia's biggest and best-rated companies seeking to raise debt. Traditionally the offshore markets have offered cheaper funding than the domestic market (although this is changing) and it was much easier to bed down really big issues overseas than domestically.
The drawback to those markets was that they were once considered out of the reach of all but the largest companies, whose names would be familiar to international fund managers. This is no longer true.
Second-tier advance
One of Australia's second-tier banks, St George Bank, recently completed a US$500 million floating-rate note issue with a five-year maturity on March 20 2002. The issue carries a coupon 0.01625 above three-month US dollar Libor and the issue price was 13 basis points above that rate. BZW managed the issue.
St George, which began life as a local building society in the southern suburbs of Sydney, has grown rapidly in the past four years through expansion and acquisition. Following its takeover of Advance Bank earlier this year, it has propelled itself into the fifth spot behind the big-four Australian-owned banks.