For private bankers sitting in Zurich, London or New York, wealth management in the Nordic region can look very odd indeed.
It is a place where even today, the concept of privacy for the wealthy – which is after all baked right into the words ‘private banking’ – does not in some countries exist at all. In Norway, for example, anyone can visit the national tax authority’s website to see how much their neighbour – or prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre or the country’s richest person, real estate magnate Ivar Tollefsen – earned the previous year.
This striking financial transparency allied to high levels of income equality and a regional embrace of Nordic-style capitalism – a blend of free-market activity and state intervention – helps to explain why so many people in the region are relaxed about saving for retirement.
This is key to understanding why the five nation states that make up the region – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – advanced in so many key sectors, from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to pharmaceuticals – are, in this corner of the financial world, undeniable laggards.
Low penetration
This is what Ole Jacob Sunde, Øystein Bø, Trond Olav Eek and Knut Jorde saw at the turn of the century when they founded Formuesforvaltning, an Oslo-based wealth manager rebranded more simply as Formue in 2022.
“When
