Danish Pension Fund P+ Names New Managing Director

The board of P+, a 150 billion Danish krone ($21.5 billion) pension fund for academics, has promoted CIO Kåre Hahn Michelsen to be its new managing director. He took over management as of June 1 and will succeed Søren Kolbye Sørensen, who had announced in March his retirement, which will be effective at the end of September.

“In this way, we ensure that during a transition period, Kåre will have the opportunity to draw on Søren’s many years of experience before he takes over himself,” P+ Board Chairman Kim Duus said in a release.

The board of P+ hired an external recruitment consultant to help choose the new managing director, and Michelsen was one of several candidates for the position.

“He is the best candidate for the job. He has many years of management experience, extensive knowledge of asset management, deep insight into the financial markets and the mechanisms behind the operation of a pension fund,” Duus said. “The fact that he already knows P+’s business model and organization from the inside is of course also an advantage.”

Michelsen has been P+’s CIO since March 2020. Prior to joining P+, he was senior vice president and investment director at Danske Bank, where he was responsible for managing investments within all asset classes. Before that, he was deputy director at Danske Bank Asset Management, and before that, he was an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School.

“There is a special responsibility in running a member-owned organization, where we must be able to find a balance in the views of our more than 110,000 members,” Michelsen said in a release. “I’ve been head of the investment department for just over three years, and now I’m looking forward to also being in charge of the rest of the talented employees.”