The Swedish Fund Selection Agency (Fondtorgsnämnden, FTN) has announced a big hike in the fee it charges investment fund providers to bid for the much-prized premium pension funds platform contracts it tenders – after realising the work took much more time than initially assumed.
On Friday, the agency said that from 1 January 2026 the tender fee would be increased to SEK35,000 (€3,180) from SEK18,000 currently, according to a decision by the FTN and the Swedish government.
However, the annual monitoring fee for affiliated funds – those listed on the platform before 20 June 2022 when the FTN began re-populating it with quality-assured procured funds – will be reduced to SEK15,000 from SEK20,000, while the annual fee for procured funds will remain unchanged, it said.
The FTN said the fee changes were being implemented to bring charges more in line with the actual cost of monitoring existing funds and evaluating received tenders.
It said its operations were financed outside the state budget, through fees from tenderers and fund managers with funds on the premium pension fund platform, which were reviewed annually to ensure they covered costs in the long term.
An FTN spokesman told IPE: “When we set the initial fee, we were working largely from estimates with limited actual data.”
“During our recent annual review, we were able to analyse our real evaluation process and found that the tender evaluation requires more time than we originally forecast,” he said, adding that this was why the agency’s costs were higher than anticipated and why the tender fee was being set higher for 2026.
The increase was not related to the number of asset managers bidding or the complexity of individual procurements, he noted.
“It’s simply that we now have actual operational data and can therefore provide more accurate cost estimates,” he continued.
“On a positive note, our annual review also showed that the monitoring fee can be reduced, as the actual time required is lower than expected,” the spokesman said.
In the agency’s latest pair of procurements to be concluded – those for Swedish passively and actively managed Swedish equity funds – it announced at the end of August that it had received 16 and 22 tenders, awarding five and 10 contracts, respectively.
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