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Translation: Original published in Finnish on 8/26/2026 at 8:35 am EEST.
Mandatum hosted an analyst event on Tuesday. The takeaways of the day focused on the progress of the company's strategy, the Cliens acquisition, and more technical topics such as organic capital generation and net financial result. Overall, the event's proceedings reinforced our view of Mandatum's excellent growth prospects in asset management, both in Finland and in international markets. The content of the day did not lead to any changes in our forecasts, and our brand-new extensive report can be read here.
In terms of its capital-light business, Mandatum is solidly on track to meet its annual earnings growth target of over 10% for the 2025–2028 strategy period. The company's management emphasized that going forward, earnings growth must increasingly come from revenue growth. This is in line with our previous estimates, as the biggest cost benefits have now been achieved and going forward the company will also have to invest increasingly in, among other things, international growth.
We believe the growth outlook for asset management is excellent. Internationally, the company has gained an increasingly strong foothold with its spearhead funds, and its investments in growth here are also yielding increasingly clear results. The domestic private wealth management market is currently experiencing robust growth, which Mandatum is also benefiting from. In addition, the company's sales machine is currently performing very well, resulting in growth that clearly outpaces the market. Company management emphasized once again that Mandatum's corporate customer side plays a completely central role for sales, as it gives Mandatum an existing relationship with customers, which clearly facilitates asset management sales.
In the growth of asset management, the company highlighted the expansion of its product offering more clearly than before. We view this positively, as Mandatum's product offering remains very concentrated even after the acquisition of Evli Awards (Cliens). The company has previously highlighted its interest in expanding its very narrow equity-side offering. In addition, we believe it would be very logical for the company to expand its offering on the alternative investments side toward a more comprehensive offering, similar to Evli, for example. Expanding on the alternative investments side would highly likely need to be done through fund-of-funds, as building an in-house specialized team is extremely difficult and takes a very long time even in the best-case scenario.
Regarding the Cliens acquisition, the company was confident, as in Q2, in the competitiveness of Cliens' flagship fund (accounting for ~60% of AUM). The fund's long-term (5Y & 10Y) track record is very good, but the past 3 years have been difficult. The company sees cross-selling potential with Cliens in both directions. In our view, the clearest short-term potential lies in offering Cliens' products to Mandatum's existing customers, but over the longer term, we consider selling Cliens' funds to international customers realistic as well, assuming that the fund's return curve starts to look better. In addition, the transaction could boost the sales of Mandatum's fixed-income products to Cliens' existing institutional clients in Sweden, although we believe this cross-selling channel involves the highest degree of uncertainty.
We remain positive on the Cliens acquisition and see a stronger foothold in the Swedish market as an interesting opportunity. At the same time, we note that the success of the transaction largely depends on the performance of Cliens' main fund in the coming years. However, we believe that the relatively low price tag of the acquisition accounts for this significant product-specific risk. We comment on the Cliens acquisition in more detail in our Q2 commentary and note that the transaction has not yet been completed, as it requires the approval of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority.
Mandatum's solvency and net financial result were also discussed at the analyst day. Due to their highly technical nature, we do not delve into these topics in more detail in this comment, and the development of asset management is in any case the most important driver of Mandatum's value. Regarding the sections on solvency and the balance sheet, our main observation was that a decrease in our estimated solvency target (to 150% in our forecasts) is a highly probable scenario during the upcoming strategy period and supports the company's longer-term profit distribution potential.