Debt capital markets,
sized for the Mittelstand.
VanillaBonds brings the proven Nordic bond format to continental Europe’s mid-caps: standardised senior secured bonds — priced, governed and tradeable — arranged in weeks, not quarters, and placed into a standing professional investor circle.
Europe’s funding map has a hole in the middle
Bank syndicate desks don’t clear their cost base below roughly €75–100m. The Schuldschein sweet spot sits around a €205m average ticket — and its 2024–26 trust break (Varta, BayWa, KTM) pushed exactly the unrated, smaller and non-German names out. Syndicated high yield starts near €200m. In between sits the ordinary, healthy European mid-cap — with nowhere to issue.
Three doors opened at once
The Schuldschein trust break
Varta (≈90% haircut via StaRUG cram-down), BayWa (€800m+ across ~255 holders) and KTM (70% write-down) broke the implicit-safety promise. The market didn’t shrink — ~€24bn in 2025 — but investors turned selective, pushing unrated, smaller and non-German names towards alternatives.
Banks can’t make small pay
Investment-grade benchmark fees run 0.25–0.45%; mid-cap placements historically cost 2.5–5% all-in. Below ≈€75–100m no syndicate desk clears its cost base — so healthy mid-caps stay trapped in loan formats they have outgrown.
The buyers already exist
Frankfurt manages >€700m in dedicated Nordic HY money. Family offices doubled private-debt allocations to 4–5%. Green mandates are starved of real EUR mid-cap paper. And since KFM’s fund liquidation, standing German mid-cap bond demand has no home.
One standard. Six to eight weeks. Tradeable from day one.
- Senior secured, trustee-governed — Nordic Trustee model: if the platform disappeared tomorrow, a tradeable security with a trustee remains.
- Floating-rate note, 3m EURIBOR + 450–975 — 3–4 year tenor, standard call schedule.
- Covenants from a standard menu — incurrence-based net leverage, FCCR, dividend basket, change-of-control put; co-written with the founding investor circle.
- Standardised disclosure — one data room, quarterly reporting through the platform, covenant certificates on file.
- Listed & tradeable — Börse Frankfurt Open Market / Euronext Oslo; institutional denominations.
- 6–8 weeks from mandate to settlement — one process, one document set, a standing professional book.
What arranging actually costs
| Channel | Arranging / placement fee | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Investment-grade benchmark | 0.25–0.45% | FCA market study, 793 deals |
| Syndicated high yield | avg 1.25% (B ≈1.5%) | FCA market study, 306 deals |
| German Mittelstandsanleihen (2010–16) | 2.5–5% · all-in ≈4.5% | trade sources |
| Nordic-format mid-market today | 1.5–3% | practitioner estimate |
| VanillaBonds target | 1.0–1.5% | our target — to be proven |
The fee is the certain saving. The strategic one is coupon compression through broader competition in the book — the claim we will only make once our own deal data proves it.
What we decline is the product
Visible minimum criteria
Deal Profile #1 is published, hard and boring: DACH · energy-transition or demonstrable sustainability angle · €20–40m · EBITDA ≥ €8–10m · net leverage ≤ 3.5× · senior secured · 3–4 years · refinancing or capex trigger · ongoing disclosure.
Visible refusal
Everything outside the profile is declined — visibly, even when it costs revenue. Declined issuers are, with consent, referred to private-credit partners. One avoidable default in the first ten deals is deadlier than ten missed deals.
Published rejection statistics
Every quarter we publish anonymised filter data. This segment produces real defaults (our 60-name dataset contains one default and one standstill) — we price risk and govern it; we don’t pretend it away.
For investors & for issuers
Investors — the Founding Circle
8–12 anchor accounts — entrepreneur money, multi-family offices, green mandates, specialist bondpickers — co-write the standard and get what followers never will:
- A standards seat: the covenant menu, disclosure set and deal profile are written with you, not for you.
- Guaranteed allocation: good books in this format get oversubscribed (recent precedent: 3.6×) and scaled back — anchors keep their full ticket.
- A filtered origination stream: origination is every credit investor’s bottleneck; ours arrives standardised, monitored, trustee-governed.
- The data: comparable credit information across a segment that has none — plus the quarterly Monitor, free.
Issuers — grow with your paper
For CFOs of companies with €8m+ EBITDA who have outgrown bilateral loans but are invisible to bank DCM:
- One process, 6–8 weeks: standard documentation, one data room, a standing book — not a nine-month odyssey.
- All-in target 1.0–1.5% against 2.5–5% historic mid-cap placement costs; amortised over five years the difference is real money.
- No bank balance-sheet dependency: diversify funding while keeping your house bank for what it is good at.
- Repeat issuance grows with you: the format carries €20m experiments to €300m programmes — the second issue is the cheapest capital you will ever raise.
Mandate to listing in six steps
DACH Nordic Bond Monitor
The quarterly state of the continental mid-cap bond market: every new issue, coupon, spread, maturity and default — built on our 60-issuer dataset. The systematic coverage this segment lost when the last dedicated barometer stopped in 2023.
The Market
Continental issuers in the Nordic bond format, from our verified dataset. Prices, spreads and order-book depth shown here are illustrative. Click any line for terms, covenants and disclosure history.
| Issuer | Ctry | Sector | Size €m | Coupon | Price | Δ par | Indic. yield | Books | Maturity | Status |
|---|
Spread vs. size — why the gap exists
Where the next mandates come from
Nordic FRNs typically refinance ~12 months before maturity via their call schedules — this calendar is nearer than it looks. Every bar below is origination: the deals must be refinanced somewhere, and the incumbent arranger has no structural lock-in.
New Issues
Left: a live bookbuild on a sample transaction — watch the book fill, place a demo order, price the deal. Right: the issuer side — check a company against Deal Profile #1 and get an indicative spread and all-in cost comparison.
Voltaria Grid Components GmbH
Order book
| Time | Account | Ticket | Limit |
|---|
- Mandated & profile check passed · 26 May 2026
- Anchor early look (48h) — €19.5m pre-committed (65%) · 30 Jun
- Books open · 3 Jul, 09:00 CET
- Pricing — spread set inside guidance by book depth
- Allocations — anchors full; open book pro-rata; hot money de-prioritised
- Settlement T+5 — paying agent, trustee in place
- Listing — Börse Frankfurt Open Market · ongoing disclosure via platform
Check your deal against Profile #1
The published filter for our first transactions. Answer honestly — everything outside the profile is declined visibly (and, with your consent, referred).
Why anchors see your deal first
Deal one is built demand-first: 60–80% of the book is pre-committed by a founding circle that co-wrote the covenant standard. You launch into certainty of placement, not into hope — the anchors underwrite your company, not the platform.