If volatile geopolitics kept pension fund tacticians on their toes in 2025, the new year is, if anything, demanding an even sharper focus.
Denmark has come into the spotlight in particular with a more expansionist US president Donald Trump driving a wedge between the Greenlandic population and the Arctic island’s Danish sovereign with his insistence the US will take control. It’s unclear how a US takeover of Greenland – however it might come about – would affect Danish pension funds, and those contacted by IPE on the subject declined to comment.
But staff at SISA Pension, the only pension fund based in Greenland itself, are certainly affected by the uncertainty over the autonomous territory’s future.
Søren Schock Petersen, Copenhagen-based chief executive officer of SISA Pension, says the fund has discussed whether to change its investment strategy in the light of developments, but has so far decided to keep it as it is. Sticking to strategy is typically the best course of action in times of crisis, he says, but he admits that in this situation, there is more at stake than investments falling in value.
In Sweden, the turn of the year marks the demise of two of the country’s five national pension buffer funds as the reform takes effect. Visitors to AP1’s website now find themselves redirected to a page on AP4’s site explaining that AP1 has been liquidated and its assets and liabilities transferred to AP4, as well as to the only other Stockholm-based buffer fund to continue, AP3.
The website of AP6 – whose assets have been merged into Gothenburg-based AP2 – remains up at the time of writing, with a proud message to visitors that, though now defunct, the specialist private equity investor produced a 700% return since its 1996 inception.
“It is this return which the decision to let one of the buffer funds to be specialised in unlisted assets, has generated to the pension system,” AP6 writes, by way of a final statement.
Items to note:
- Pension Research Institute Iceland (PRICE) is hosting a discussion event on Friday 16 January at Nordic House in Reykjavik entitled “Lessons from Denmark: PPP investments and means-tested benefits”, with Danish pension expert speakers Jens-Christian Stougaard and Anders Bruun.
- Nordea Pension, P+ and PBU shine out as having produced the highest 2025 returns for their savers among Danish pension funds, according to the latest comparison table compiled by consultant Nikolaj Holdt Mikkelsen, who comments that currency hedging of US equities was clearly the most important driver behind 2025 pension fund returns.
Rachel Fixsen
Nordic Correspondent
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