LUXEMBOURG- The Swiss arm of Icelandic financial services provider Kaupthing Bank has received regulatory approval for a multi-employer Assep in Luxembourg. The new defined contribution fund, KBridge, aims to attract expatriates working for large multinationals.

Kaupthing Services, the Lausanne-based pensions administration arm of the bank and organiser of the new Assep, says it has forty members from six companies ready to join the fund. The six companies are large multinationals from outside Iceland.

The fund will use BNP Paribas for custody, KPMG Luxembourg will audit it while local consultant Hepta will provide liability management. Kaupthing Bank in Reykjavik will provide asset management.

Bjarni Markusson Thorisson, managing director of Kaupthing Services, says they intend to take on up to 300 members by the end of next June and to have up to 10,000 members within two to three years, projections that have produced an asset target of e15m within a year.

Target market is, specifically, international companies with some mobile executives but an insufficient number to justify launching their own Assep. Thorisson estimates that a company requires at least 1,500 expatriates to make it worthwhile going it alone rather than renting a compartment.

The fund is defined contribution and will be nominated in Euros, dollars and Swiss Francs. Kaupthing has begun marketing in France and Switzerland and it will target French expatriates in the Netherlands and Germany later this year. Marketing in the United States will begin following that.

At the beginning of the year Dexia Insurance & Pension Services launched a multi-compartment ASSEP to provide supplementary pensions for Dexia Group’s 3,000 Luxembourg-based employees






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