SISA Pension, the only pension fund based in Greenland, is sticking with its current investment strategy amid the heightened geopolitical tensions around the Danish autonomous territory in the Arctic, while its leadership sits out the deep uncertainty over the island’s future.
Recent pronouncements by US president Donald Trump about his determination to control Greenland have rattled relations between the US, Denmark and Europe lately, especially in the light of the Trump administration’s show of force in taking control of Venezuela.
Søren Schock Petersen, chief executive officer of SISA Pension, said in an interview with Danish news service FinansWatch: “There is a general debate in Greenlandic society, and I have the pleasure of working closely with a lot of people who live and work in Greenland. They’re shocked. That goes without saying.”
SISA Pension, which had DKK6.6bn (€880m) of assets at the end of 2024, has 43,546 members compared to Greenland’s total population of 57,000. Six of its 10 staff are based in the Greenlandic capital Nuuk, with the rest working in Denmark – including Schock Petersen.
The pension fund has outsourced its core administrative IT system to AkademikerPension since 2022 – a contract Akademiker won from AP Pension, with the migration to the new system having taken place a year ago.
Schock Petersen said in the article that the pension fund was not simply continuing as if nothing had happened.
“We have had discussions about our investment strategy, but so far we have not decided to change it,” he added.
“We have talked about whether we should have fewer investments in the US, exactly as I hear Danish pension companies are either considering or have already done,” he said, adding that SISA Pension’s US weighting mirrored that of the world market.
Crises happened from time to time, he noted. “The best thing to do is typically to stick to your strategy, and we are doing that now. But that can, of course, change.
“In this situation, there is more at stake than investments falling in value. There is something more fundamental at stake, and there is a slightly different undertone,” he said.
In the FinansWatch interview, he declined to speculate about Greenland’s future.
“We cannot navigate purely hypothetical scenarios that we have no chance of predicting the probability of. We can navigate according to reality as it looks today,” he stated.
“We haven’t started reading up on American pensions legislation. But if reality changes, we must deal with it. Then we would have to familiarise ourselves with US legislation and become subject to US financial supervision,” Schock Petersen said.
But whatever happened, he said, SISA Pension members’ savings would be safe.
“In all conceivable scenarios, we will have ownership of the assets that we and our members have,” he said.
