Estonia — EIB Group (EIB/EIF) signs EUR 197 million synthetic securitisation guarantee with Coop Pank

Mechanism

Coop Pank transfers part of the credit risk on a EUR 200 million portfolio of SME/mid-cap loans and leases to the EIB Group via a synthetic securitisation. The EIF issues a EUR 197 million financial guarantee covering the senior tranche (EUR 171 million, EIB and EIF) and mezzanine tranche (EUR 26 million, EIB); Coop Pank retains the EUR 3 million junior (first-loss) tranche. Because the senior and mezzanine risk is now supranationally guaranteed, Coop Pank's regulatory capital requirement against the underlying portfolio falls, freeing balance-sheet capacity to originate new lending.

Coop Pank can deploy up to EUR 249 million of new loans and leases to Estonian SMEs and mid-caps over a two-and-a-half-year revolving period running to end-2028, with EIB Group–mandated minimum allocations of EUR 49 million to gender-equality-linked lending and EUR 17 million to climate action/environmental sustainability. This is the first synthetic securitisation completed by Coop Pank and, per the EIB, the first in the Baltic region structured entirely around a single country's loan book (rather than a pan-Baltic or pan-Nordic pool). Global Trade Alert logs the same transaction as a "red"-flagged state-linked lending-support intervention (state act 95692 / intervention 151399), treating supranationally-guaranteed, below-market-cost credit to a segment of domestic borrowers as a potential trade- and competition-distorting subsidy.

Downstream implications

• Follows the same EIB Group "capital-relief guarantee unlocks SME/mid-cap lending" template seen

repeatedly across EU counterpart banks in December 2025 (e.g. Piraeus Bank Growth4MidCaps LRS II, UniCredit Banka Slovenija G4M) — part of a broader EIB Group year-end distribution push rather than an Estonia-specific policy shift.

• No sector or material targeting disclosed; this is horizontal SME/mid-cap credit-access support,

not a sector- or supply-chain-specific subsidy.

• As Coop Pank's first securitisation of this type, it establishes a template other Baltic

lenders may follow for capital relief without direct state fiscal outlay.

Open questions

• The EIB press materials do not disclose the guarantee fee/pricing paid by Coop Pank to the EIB

Group, which would determine how far below market cost the resulting SME lending is priced.

• Number or profile of SME/mid-cap borrowers expected to be reached under the EUR 249 million

facility is not specified in the available public sources.