When Barclays launched and priced Pavillion Consumer 2025-1, an almost £3.8bn securitisation of consumer loans, with everything but the senior and reserve fund notes pre-placed, several market participants assumed Pimco was behind the deal — and that meant the bonds would be locked up for good.

It was a reasonable guess. The West Coast asset manager is the largest buyer of pools of consumer risk in Europe, and often buys deals structured into securitisations, but without external leverage — it has deep pockets and can find a home for a full capital structure.

Barclays did not market the transaction widely and was looking for an investor that could take down the whole capital structure — other than the senior notes, which the bank would retain.

Pimco won the bidding for the portfolio, but, unusually, did not take down all of the available bonds itself, turning instead to Bank of America’s ABS trading desk to underwrite and buy a portion of the investment-grade mezzanine notes and place them with other investors in the secondary market, according to several market participants familiar with the trade.