The Swedish Fund Selection Agency (Fondtorgsnämnden, FTN) is giving would-be bidders in its huge Swedish equity funds procurement an extra week because of late changes to conditions, and also released details today of its upcoming active global equities tender.
The agency, formed two years ago to transform the quality of the offering on the premium pension system’s funds platform by procuring funds, said today that the new deadline for submitting tenders for actively and passively managed Swedish equity funds would now be 7 November.
This pushes the deadline to ask questions about the SEK155bn (€13.7bn) procurement back to 28 October, and the new last day for publishing answers to questions is now 1 November – six days before the tender deadline, the agency said.
The one-week delay is due to an adjustment of the mandatory requirements in the request for proposal, the FTN said.
It has said it is withdrawing the requirement regarding the option of the last approved annual report of the fund before the interview, and also removing its demand for fund managers to attach the most recent annual report to the tender.
A third change to the procurement specification for this particular tender that the FTN has made is that, for funds less than three years old, active risk is to be calculated and stated for the strategy instead of the fund.
The FTN also published preliminary specifications for its planned procurement process for actively managed global equity funds, and firmed up the date for the tender launch, saying that would now happen in November.
The agency added the procurement – covering some SEK200bn of premium pension savings — into its running order of planned tenders for this year in June, having prioritised it over a previously planned tender for global bonds in order to get more capital flowing into the procured platform as quickly as possible.
Among specifications detailed today, the FTN did not stipulate a particular global index that funds should aim to outperform, but said the benchmark index for funds in that category should be “one that is rules-based, transparent, constitutes an appropriate reference for the market it pertains to, is publicly disclosed in an appropriate manner”.
The agency’s own category benchmark for the strategy, however, is revealed as the MSCI World ex-Controversial Weapons.
Separately, the FTN said today that it now intended to announce the results of its procurement of European and global equity funds index – a process launched on the last day of February – at the end of October or the beginning of November.
It had previously only said the award decision would come in the fourth quarter of 2024.
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