A merger to create Iceland’s fifth largest pension fund has just won approval from both funds’ members, with Almenni and Lífverk now set to merge their operations next year.

The two funds announced this morning that electronic voting carried out among their members this week had resulted in 87% approval of the proposed merger from Almenni’s members, and 81% approval from those of the smaller fund Lífsverk.

The new fund will be called Almenni-Lífsverk, the funds announced, and will come into being officially on 1 January, provided it is approved by the Competition Authority and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs.

It will be the fifth largest pension fund in Iceland with total assets of around ISK700bn (€4.8bn), said the funds, whose boards and management approved the idea of merging at the end of September.

The votes resulted from participation by 1,605 members at Almenni and 929 members at Lífsverk.

According to their annual reports, Almenni had 63,414 scheme members at the end of 2024, while Lífsverk had 3,526 active members and 6,228 members with rights in the fund.

Eva Hlín Dereksdóttir, chair of Lífsverk, said: “We are grateful for the good participation in the elections and the trust of the fund members.

“The result confirms that the fund members see the opportunities of the merger and want us to use economies of scale to create solid pension rights for them for the future,” she added.

Sigríður Magnúsdóttir, chair of Almenni – which is currently the seventh biggest pension fund in the country in terms of assets – said that with the merger, “an important step has been taken towards a stronger, more efficient and more competitive pension fund”.

A week ago, Brú Pension Fund announced that the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs had confirmed the fund’s articles of association, and therefore its merger with the Akureyri Employees’ Pension Fund (LSA) had become a reality.

These are the latest mergers in the continuing consolidation of the Icelandic pension fund sector, bringing the number of pension funds to less than 20 from some 96 in 1980.

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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