ANZ has defended its inaugural covered bond issue against charges that it paid too much and that it failed to tap a wider investor base.The bank's head of structured funding, John Needham, said: "In terms of our deal, pricing was 60 per cent of the margin we would have got in the unsecured market."There were 67 investors. We were happy with that. We had wide distribution. Seventy five per cent of the issue went to real money investors, such as pension funds. We had new investors and we had existing investors taking meaningful exposures. Speaking at the Australian Securitisation Forum conference, Needham conceded it was not all plain sailing. "Investors said to us: 'Tell us about Australia's housing bubble.' There is a lot of misunderstanding about our real estate market and the way our mortgages work."ANZ and Westpac each paid 115 basis points over US Treasury mid-swaps for their covered bond issues last week. ANZ issued US$1.25 billion and Westpac issued US$1 billion.In the case of ANZ, the issue is understood to have been swapped back to Australian dollars at 150 basis points over bank bills. Westpac's swap cost would have been similar.Needham said: "We are looking to get our benchmark for covered bonds completed. I would think we are still a while away from doing anything with RMBS."Over the past couple of days there have been reports that Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank have decided to delay their covered bond issuance while they wait for things to settle down in the European and US debt markets.Neil Bradley, a treasury executive at NAB, said securitisation would be 15 per cent of the bank's total funding this financial year - a combination of RMBS and covered bonds. "There was strong investor demand for the US dollar tranche in our recent RMBS. We will take that into account," he said.Bradley said: "We did 11 cities [on the US leg of the bank's covered bond roadshow] and we met investors we had not seen before. This product will expand our investor base."And Suncorp treasurer Tim Hughes said: "When covered bonds were legislated we thought we would let our bigger brothers go first. We will go early next year. We are not sure, at this stage, if it will be a domestic or offshore issue."