Credit (part 1): ups, downs and regional differences

Global sales of credit-linked structured products, also known as products linked to reference entities, reached an estimated US$7.8 billion in 2025 – down 18% YoY but an increase of more than 40% from the US$5.4 billion that was invested in credit-linked products five years ago.

^{Global: credit-linked, new sales (US$m)}

_{Source: SRP}

In terms of the overall market, credit-linked products have always been marginal. In 2025, they made up approximately 0.4% of the total market, down from 0.7% the previous year while their average during the past five years stood at 0.6%.

^{Global: credit-linked products - market share by sales volumes}

_{Source: SRP}

In this chapter, we also include hybrid credit products, were apart from the reference entity, the return also depends on an underlying, often an equity index. In 2025, just over US$1 billion was invested in this product type, which was approximately 13% of the total market. These products are mostly seen in Italy.

Regional spread and markets

Some US$5.8 billion was invested in credit-linked products targeted at investors in the Emea region during 2025 while US$2 billion was invested in the Asia Pacific.

^{Global: credit - new sales by region (US$m)}

_{Source: SRP}
Emea registered a big hike in volumes in the past five-years: from US$ 970m in 2021 to US$6.9 billion in 2024, before slightly dropping to US$5.8 billion in 2025. On the other hand, sales in Asia Pacific decreased from US$4.5 billion to US$2 billion in the period under review.

The Americas stayed well behind the other two regions with just US$5.4m invested in credit-linked products during 2025, down from US$75m the previous year. Between 2021 and 2023 there were no credit-linked products registered in the Americas region, according to the SRP database.

^{Global: credit-linked vs total market sales growth}

_{Source: SRP}

In Emea, Italy was the main market for credit-linked products with sales of US$2.6m (from 413 products) registered in 2025, with financial institutions the most popular reference entities. Of these, Unicredit (54 products), Intesa Sanpaolo (49), Mediobanca (29), Santander (28) and Deutsche Bank (27) made up the top five.

In France, US$1 billion was tied into 270 credit-linked products with the iTraxx Europe family of credit default swap (CDS) indices, which tracks the creditworthiness and default risk of major corporate entities across Europe, the most used (100 products).

Finland and Sweden, with sales of US$315m (from 94 products) and US$125m (from 73 products), respectively, where also markets were investors actively pursued credit-linked products, again via the iTraxx Europe as well as the Markit CDX North America High Yield and IG indices while in South Africa, First Rand Merchant Bank issued 64 products linked to a South African Government Bond.

In Asia Pacific, issuance focused on South Korea, where investors were responsible for more than three quarters of total sales for the region (US$1.5 billion from 380 products). India was another active market, with sales of US$375m gathered from 20 products that were wrapped as a debenture (long-term, fixed-income corporate debt instrument used to raise capital).

Credit-linked notes in Thailand, like those in South Africa, were linked to Government bonds, including those of the US and Indonesia, while there was also limited activity in Taiwan.

All 2025 credit-linked issuance in the Americas were unregistered notes targeted at investors in the US. These came from Itau, which manufactured 22 notes that were tied to 10 different reference entities, of which Arcelor Mittal was the most frequently used (six products) ahead of Petrobras International Finance, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase (three each).

This is an abstract of the SRP Asset Class Report 2026 which is available for download here. 

_{Image: Reden/Adobe Stock}

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