The Danish pension fund for doctors, Lægernes Pension, has decided against merging its investment operations with those of two other professional pension funds that are already merged, citing differences in processes that have proved to be too great.

Lægernes Pension, which has DKK115m (€15.5bn) in assets, said it had hired an external consultancy to find out whether it made sense to merge its investment with that of JØP, the lawyers and economists’ pension fund, and DIP, the civil and academic engineers’ pension fund.

DIP and JØP merged their investment operations in 2013 and followed this in 2015 by amalgamating their administrative operations.

Chresten Dengsøe, chief executive at Lægernes Pension, said: “In conjunction with the consultancy Oliver Wyman, we have discovered what we could gain by having an actual joint investment operation, which we don’t already benefit from in the current cooperation.

“In the course of this, we found out that the differences in our processes are too significant for it to be to the advantage of all parties.”

The three pension funds had therefore chosen to keep the current form of their cooperation, which is based on, inter alia, JØP and DIP’s investing via Lægernes Pension’s subsidiary Lægernes Invest.

Lægernes Pension said it set up Lægernes Invest in 2004 to make its investment simpler and cheaper and also to reap economies of scale by investing alongside others.

In the last few years, the three pension funds had also linked up on larger alternative investments – in wind energy and logistics properties, for example.

The pension fund said it had been investigating the possibility of deepening its cooperation with JØP and DIP for the last few months and that this exploratory work was now at an end.

“To be competitive, it is important you question your business model now and then,” Dengsøe said.

Having someone else look at its affairs had been a healthy thing to do, he said, and added that the consultancy’s analysis had resulted in a series of recommendations about the best way the pension fund could operate.

“We are now in full swing implementing these recommendations in our investment processes,” he said.

The doctors’ fund said it cooperated with various different pension funds over investment.

Apart from the link-up with JØP and DIP, Lægernes Pension said it worked with Nordea Pension, Danica and Lønmodtagernes Dyrtidsfond on certain investments.

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