IGTA Journal - Summer 2020

recent years, and issues are made at negative rates for up to twelve months. Moreover, they are generally reluctant to compromise on the yield curves according to the moods of the market, even if some of them say that they readily rely on the expertise and professionalism of their intermediaries. Sic transit... The short-term securities market can boast many assets, as the growing success of the NEU CP attests, but it remains a market. In the blink of an eye, the market has gone from being a real godsend for companies - some of them were issuing NEU CPs and placing the capital in money market funds in a form of carry trade (in 2019, for example, it was common practice to issue at rates lower than those earned by money market funds, - 0.27%) - to a virtual freeze in the market, caused, it is true, by an unprecedented economic shock. "The crisis is there to remind us that maintaining good relations with one´s banks is essential. Market financing is particularly good... until the markets close," says Olivier Salmon, Edenred's treasury director. In the United States, the United Kingdom and the euro zone, central banks have had to intervene quickly and energetically to restore balances that were endangered by the massive outflow recorded by money market funds. Extension of the NEU CPs' domain One of the objectives of the 2016 reform in France was to allow access to the market for smaller companies. Is the development of the market in recent years set to continue? This will depend on the interest that international banks established in Europe might take in it (for the moment they are mainly involved in the Euro CP and US CP markets), on the awareness of large non-French European companies of this market ("I meet them very regularly and note that many of them are beginning to perceive the advantages of the NEU CP market", notes Christine Mahamba, senior manager trading & sales at Bred Bank), the appropriation of this market by SMEs ("A very large number of SMEs can become issuers of NEU CP", says Philippe Tastevin, Deputy CEO of Qivalio, a rating agency approved by the ESMA that rates 10% of non-financial issuers of NEU CP), or the multiplication of programmes with an extra-financial component. Do platforms have a role to play? We will have an answer in a few months, provided the economic tsunami does not sweep everything away. IGTA eJournal | Summer 2020 | 16