Capital Markets: 6 Trends that Shaped the Last Year and Will Keep Us Busy in 2022

The world economy recovered in 2021. The growth in global gross domestic product left it in better shape than even before the pandemic, but new waves of COVID-19, inflation concerns, and supply bottlenecks caused uncertainty to resurge toward the end of the year.

From the perspective of the Swiss and Spanish stock exchanges, both of which are operated by SIX since its takeover of BME, the recovery was reflected in the performance of their two benchmark blue-chip indices: the SMI gained 20.3% in 2021 and the IBEX 35 advanced 7.9%. The year was shaped by the integration of products and services from the now third-largest operator of capital market infrastructure in Europe and the fourth-largest player in securities trading and post-trading operations. The securities exchanges operated by SIX hosted a combined total of 25 IPOs last year. But looking back on 2021, six additional things caught our attention on the Swiss and Spanish capital market:

Sustainability set the agenda on the Spanish fixed-income market in 2021 as 27 new ESG bonds came onto the market, including the first 5 billion euro green sovereign issue.

The market for fixed-income securities continues to expand in general anyway. The MARF alternative fixed-income market operated by BME, which is geared toward SMEs, welcomed its 100th corporate issuer in spring 2021 in the eighth year of its existence.

BME Growth, the SME segment of the Spanish market, has successfully paved the way for more small and midsize companies to go public. Fifteen companies in 2021 alone chose this avenue to growth capital. This pathway is now also available on SIX Swiss Exchange through Sparks, the SME segment launched in autumn 2021.

In addition, the first SPAC went public on SIX Swiss Exchange in December. A SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) is a company without active business operations. This “corporate shell” uses the capital it raises to afterwards acquire a privately held company, the identity of which is unknown at the time of the SPAC’s IPO.

In September 2021, FINMA authorized the licenses that SIX needed to start operating SIX Digital Exchange (SDX). They marked the first permits ever issued in the Swiss financial sector for infrastructures that enable trading and integrated settlement of tokenized digital assets.

In November, SDX commenced operations with a tokenized bond, the world’s first bond with a purely digital tranche ever issued in a fully regulated environment. The bond offering was several times oversubscribed and attracted keen interest from a broad institutional investor base in Switzerland.