Risk-based allocations and impact innovation

Over the past years, the Danish pension company Velliv has undergone a rapid transformation. Some five years ago, its investment team had the modest size of five members of staff but this has now grown to about 40 people. Subsequently, the DKK 324 billion (EUR 43.5 billion) pension company’s investment team is looking more in line with other large Nordic pension players.

Velliv is the former Nordea Life & Pension Denmark and began the process of breaking away from the Nordea group in 2016. These days, it is an independent pension company that is fully owned by its customers through the association Velliv Foreningen. One of the reasons for having had such a limited investment team compared to its considerable amount of assets has been the strategy of relying almost exclusively on external managers – a strategy going back to its Nordea days. Asked about whether the recruitment drive is related to more investments being managed internally, Velliv’s chief investment officer Anders