...August 30, 2024 This report does not constitute a rating action. FRANKFURT (S&P Global Ratings) Aug. 30, 2024--S&P Global Ratings said today that the recent issuance of various digital bonds has allowed Germany's development bank KfW to explore important aspects of this innovative funding tool, while controlling embedded risks. We count four transactions that KfW (###/Stable/A-1+) has brought to the market since December 2022 and that can be labelled as "digital." In our view, careful structuring of these issues has kept the risks from the instruments' novel features well contained. Accordingly, all these bonds carry, depending on their tenor, the same '###' or 'A-1+' issue rating as KfW's conventional senior unsecured debt. KfW started issuing digital bonds in December 2022, when a 20 million pilot transaction for the first time used the possibility to issue electronic--though still centrally registered--securities in Germany (see "KfW's 20 Million Digital 2024 Issuance Rated '###'," published...
