In Sweden, Alecta seems to have dodged the most serious potential consequence of its 2023 bad investments crisis – the loss of its mandate as default provider in the ITP occupational pension scheme. The ITP Committee, which governs the scheme for privately-employed salaried employees, decided at the end of April, after deliberations, not to cancel the major contract.
Even though Alecta had been reprimanded and fined by the Swedish FSA for risk control failings around its loss-making investment in residential property firm Heimstaden Bostad, the employer and trade union bodies behind the ITP scheme noted that the watchdog had also judged “that the prognosis for Alecta to continue to comply with the applicable regulations is good”.
In the country’s premium pension system, however, another contentious process appears quite some way from resolution. After losing out in the largest funds procurement in the ongoing repopulation of the system’s private funds platform, Indecap Fonder – previously the second-biggest funds provider in the category at issue – has now expanded its legal arguments beyond its initial application for judicial review lodged in March.
The Swedish Fund Selection Agency, which has been carrying out a long list of procurements to reform the platform, has warned that when a claim is successively expanded in this way, it risks prolonging the process before the court can actually reach a decision.
“Each extension of the process means that pension savers have to wait longer to benefit from the procured funds with lower fees and high-quality requirements,” said the agency’s executive director Erik Fransson.
In Oslo at the annual parliamentary hearing on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund last week, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) chief executive officer Nicolai Tangen chose to focus his speech on the importance of AI technology and the concentration of the fund in a small handful of US tech stocks.
“There is a concentration risk around a few companies that we have never seen before in the fund’s history. And it may continue to increase,” he told parliamentarians, and said that in his opinion, AI was “the most important thing happening in the world at the moment”.
While AI had contributed to huge investment gains for the Government Pension Fund Global via the technology stocks that weigh so heavily in its portfolio, NBIM’s use of the technology had also played a part in reducing trading costs by almost NOK5bn (€460m) over five years, the lawmakers heard.
The finance ministry recently tasked NBIM with analysing and assessing concentration risk in the GPFG’s equity portfolio, among other things.
Items to note:
- Former top staff from AP1, the Stockholm-based national pensions buffer fund, which was shut down at the end of 2025 as part of a reform, are continuing to find new jobs, with former AP1 CEO Kristin Magnusson Bernard announced this week as the new CEO of Handelsbanken Fonder.
- AP2 in Gothenburg – one of the three remaining AP buffer funds following the reform – has begun advertising for a new CEO to replace Eva Halvarsson who is to retire. The buffer fund says it is seeking “a strategic and values-driven leader with the mission to manage the Swedish people’s pension money for a good pension for all generations”.
Rachel Fixsen
Nordic Correspondent
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