Denmark’s Sampension has expanded its management group to nine from seven, ushering in a series of changes as former ATP man Mads Smith Hansen starts work as chief operating officer.

Including a new hire in February, the revamp has ended the all-male management line-up at the DKK293bn (€39bn) labour-market pensions group, by adding two women.

Sampension divides its overall management group into an executive board – which now consists of Smith Hansen and chief executive officer Hasse Jørgensen– and a leadership group that has expanded to include seven members of staff, up from six.

Pernille Vastrup has been appointed as a new member of the leadership group from yesterday, becoming chief financial officer. She was previously head of risk management at the Copenhagen-based company for two years, having worked at banking group Nykredit before that.

Vastrup is replacing the previous CFO Morten Lund Madsen, who is in turn moving to the role of director of IT – which is the one newly-created role within the leadership group.

Vastrup has become the leadership group’s second female member, after Anne Louise Baltzer Engelund came on board at the beginning of February as the new product director.

She also heads up the actuarial, customer law and IT development departments in what is a newly-devised role, and replaced former mathematical director Flemming Windfeld.

Smith Hansen was announced as the new COO and the second member of the executive board of the two group entities Sampension Livsforsikring and Sampension Administrationsselskab back in October, and started working in his new job yesterday.

He joined from Danish traditional pensions specialist Norli Pension, where he had been CEO, but had a spell at the statutory pension fund ATP before that.

Sampension said when Smith Hansen was appointed that growing business volume and the associated complexity had prompted it to expand the executive board to two members.

Other management changes made yesterday at Sampension, include the appointment of leadership group member Christian Due as director, with responsibility for the company’s management secretariat. He has worked at Sampension since 2013.

The firm also announced the promotion of Marie-Claire Reffs, who has worked as actuary at Sampension for four and half years, to head of the finance business unit within the actuarial department.

Smith Hansen’s new start at Sampension is actually a return to an organisation he has worked at before. Prior to taking on the role of chief risk officer at ATP in 2015, he was CFO at Sampension – a position he held since 2010.

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