PenSam announced yesterday it is selling its non-life insurance subsidiary to a Norwegian insurance group, a fortnight after another Copenhagen-based pension provider, PFA, declared it was offloading a banking subsidiary as part of a focus on its core business.

Labour-market pension fund PenSam, which caters mainly for public sector workers in the health, social care and education sectors, said in a statement it was selling PenSam Forsikring to the Oslo-listed Nordic non-life insurer Gjensidige.

PenSam said: “The competitive situation makes it more difficult to maintain a profitable business for a smaller non-life insurance company.”

The pension fund said it had reached an agreement to sell the unit to Gjensidige in order to continue to be able to offer attractive and competitive insurance to PenSam’s members.

The DKK178bn (€23.9bn) pensions group did not disclose the value of the sale, but said PenSam Forsikring had premium income of DKK118m in 2022.

In mid-June, PFA – Denmark’s biggest pension provider – said it had agreed to sell its subsidiary PFA Bank to major Danish bank Jyske Bank in a deal which also entailed handing over to Jyske Bank the management of its mutual funds unit PFA Invest, while retaining that unit within the group.

The price for the transaction was DKK245m, said commercial mutual pensions group PFA, which had total assets of DKK736.3bn at the end of last year.

Ole Krogh Petersen, PFA’s chief executive officer, said: “For PFA, this means that we are now more simply structured, so that in future we can focus even more on our core business, which is our 1.3 million pension customers.”

Jyske Bank was a strong manager and good at advising customers, he said.

“We are therefore convinced that PFA Bank’s customers will continue to be in safe and competent hands,” the CEO said.

PFA Bank had seen growth in its customer numbers over the years, PFA said, but it said large investments would be required to achieve further profitable growth at the bank.

Nina Groth, the director of PFA Bank since April 2019, is resigning in connection with the bank’s sale to Jyske Bank, PFA said.

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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