External service providers

Norges Bank purchases a number of services from external service providers. All contracts with external service providers are the result of thorough negotiations and are subject to legal quality assurance before they are signed.

The main service providers are:

External managers

The use of external managers is an important element of the investment strategy. We award investment mandates to organisations with expertise within clearly defined investment areas. We award external equity mandates in markets and segments where it is not practical or realistic to build internal expertise. More information about the external mandates.

Custody and clearing of securities

Norges Bank uses one global custodian for international payments and securities custody and clearing, Citibank N.A.

Transaction settlement with counterparties

Norges Bank has implemented the system SimCorp Dimension to handle all transaction settlement and asset servicing for the internally managed portfolios (equities and fixed income). Norges Bank uses Goldman Sachs as the main clearing broker for Financial Futures. For CFDs, Norges Bank uses GOldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citibank.

Performance measurement

The return on the equity and fixed-income portfolios is calculated using the performance system Statpro Performance and Attribution from Statpro Group Plc.

FactSet provides investment data, asset analytics, risk measurement and performance attribution.

Fund accounting

Norges Bank uses the Agresso ERP system supplied by Unit4 Business Software as the system for internal accounting and reporting. Nordea Bank (Oslo) and HSBC (offices abroad) provide banking services.

Deloitte AS serves as the Norges Bank appointed auditor.

Benchmarks

The funds benchmark portfolios are provided by:

• FTSE International Ltd for the equity portfolio
• Bloomberg Index Services Ltd for the fixed-income portfolio

Investment Market Data

The fund’s investment data are provided by:

• Bloomberg
• Refinitiv

Trading

Longview delivered by Linedata Ltd. is the order management system for both equity and fixed-income trading. 

Voting

Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) provides voting-related research and voting recommendations based on a bespoke voting policy set by Norges Bank Investment Management. We instruct on voting via the ISS voting platform (ProxyExchange).

Market Risk

The market risk in the portfolios is measured using the risk model RiskManager provided by MSCI.

The Distributed Computing Engine from Techila Ltd is used to simplify utilization of cloud resources for intraday market monitoring and other High-Performance Computing workloads.

Real Estate Services

State Street Administration Services (UK) Ltd and its affiliates are responsible for providing administration and accounting services for the real estate portfolio entities.

Credit Ratings

The credit ratings of the fixed-income portfolio and unsecured counterparty exposures are based on deliveries from:

• Fitch Ratings Ltd
• Moody’s Corporation
• Standard & Poor’s Global Market Intelligence LLC

Operational risk, Control and Compliance

The control and compliance department uses various systems to manage operational risk and ensure that the organisation is compliant with investment guidelines. One of the systems used for handling operational risk is EasyRisk, delivered by DNV-GL.

IT Operations

Norges Bank IT infrastructure is hosted on the public cloud services from Amazon Web Services.