The Swedish Fund Selection Agency (Fondtorgsnämnden, FTN) has announced it will be procuring around SEK80bn (€7.2bn) of funds in 2026 for the premium pension funds platform, starting by inviting tenders for US and North American equity funds in the first quarter.
In yesterday’s announcement, the agency released the preliminary specifications for the first two of those four processes it will launch, which will be a dual procurement for the equity fund categories of US and North America, large and mid-cap, active and passive management — as it announced in September.
Among the conditions stated in order for US and North American funds to qualify, the FTN said that neither leverage nor investment in other funds was permitted for either the active or passive versions of the funds, while actively managed funds had to be run with at least 2% active risk or 60% in active share compared to the benchmark.
There are currently some SEK12bn of premium pension savings invested in the active management side of that category and SEK29bn invested in the passively managed funds, the agency said, although, as usual, it cautioned that there was no guarantee that the procured volumes will be equally large.
The Tumba-based agency said that together, these two procurements would affect around 244,000 premium pension savers.
After the US and North American equity funds dual procurement, the FTN will launch procurements for actively managed equity funds in the healthcare and biotech sector, and separately, procure actively managed Swedish money market funds.
That will be the first time the FTN has selected fixed income managers since it started its task of repopulating the premium pension funds platform with quality-assured fund offerings in 2022.
There are currently SEK26bn of savings invested in health and biotech funds and SEK13bn in Sweden money market funds, according to the agency.
The order of those latter two procurements has not yet been determined, the FTN said.
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