"The issue which closed for subscription on Thursday, saw a late surge of interest from the retail investors and the collections nearly doubled in the last five days," sources said, adding that the issue generated good response from the institutional investors.

The exact amount garnered was however not disclosed by IDBI officials, who cited operational difficulties in collating the data. However, the preliminary figures confirm that Flexibond-VII has been a far more successful debt issue than the recently concluded borrowing programme of ICICI.

The ICICI issue managed to get only about Rs 370 crore against the targeted amount of Rs 600 crore.

The flexibond-VII issue, which offered four unsecured bond schemes aggregating Rs 750 crore, gave the financialinstitution the option to retain oversubscription upto an additional Rs 750 crore. The four schemes offered an average annualised interest rate of 12.50 per cent.

Sources close to the financial institution said that the `regular income bond' has been able to rope in the maximum subscriptions. However, the `retirement bond' -- which offers three options to the investors and has yield-to-maturities (YTMs) ranging from 12.52 per cent to 12.98 per cent -- may not have done as well. "However, IDBI will do the detailed performance analysis of all the schemes offered by the Flexibond-VII issue to decide whether any one of these needs to be replaced in the subsequent issues," a senior IDBI official said.

Market sources pointed out that the Flexibond-VII issue benefited substantially from the low interest rates prevailing in the market. "IDBI's debt issue offered significantly better returns at a time when there is a downward pressure on the interest rates -primarily on account of low rate of inflation," sourcesadded.