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    Swedish Savers Embrace Dark Green Funds

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    Stockholm (NordSIP) – Following last year’s adoption of the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation (SFDR), there has been a hope that the new regulation would bring increased transparency and enhanced scrutiny to financial markets. Towards this end, Fondbolagens Förening, the Swedish Investment Fund Association, has now started collecting quarterly data on Swedish savers’ fund savings distributed according to the EU’s sustainability classification.

    According to the data collected by the association, 89% of Swedish savers’ funds, worth SEK5.6 trillion, can be described as light green funds that promote environmental or social characteristics. 4% of the assets, worth SEK260 billion, are invested in dark green funds that have sustainable investments as targets. The remaining 7%, worth SEK430 billion, are invested in other funds that are not included in the two previous categories. Although savers faced falling share prices and withdrawals from equity funds during the first quarter, the dark green funds showed a net inflow of SEK5.3 billion. Detailed data is available from Fondbolagens Förening

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    “The fact that fund savers choose to increase their investments in dark green equity funds during a quarter in which many active savers have chosen to sell shows that the demand for sustainable investments is resisting a turbulent stock market. When there is great interest among savers, it is encouraging to see that the fund supply is also growing and is now as much as 10 times larger than last year,” says Philip Scholtzé, savings economist at Fondbolagens förening.

    Commenting on this occasion, Åsa Wallenberg, CEO of SPP Fonder and Nordic Fund Manager at Storebrand, emphasised the growth of sustainable investments from Swedish savings’ funds and noted that SPP Fonder enjoyed inflows of SEK 4 billion during the last quarter.

    Figures about the adoption of SFDR classifications in Sweden should be compared with survey of Swedish funds’ classification conducted in October 2021 by Finansinspektion, the Swedish Financial Services Authority (FSA).

    According to the survey, for 43 funds (5.5%), the fund managers considered sustainability risks to be irrelevant. 150 funds (19.1%), fund managers considered sustainability risks to be relevant, as per Article 6 of SFDR. There were 580 funds (73.9%) self/reported Article 8 funds products, which promote environmental and/or social characteristics and only 12 funds (1.5 %) had sustainable investment as their goal, thus falling under the remit of Article 9 SFDR.

    Filipe Albuquerque
    Filipe Albuquerque
    Filipe is an economist with 8 years of experience in macroeconomic and financial analysis for the Economist Intelligence Unit, the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research, the Stockholm School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Filipe holds a MSc in European Political Economy from the LSE and a MSc in Economics from the University of London, where he currently is a PhD candidate.

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