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.

Norges Bank has set up BNY Mellon as contingent custodian.

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.

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.

Ernst & Young 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 Real Time Investment Data is provided by Bloomberg Finance L.P.

Trading

Longview delivered by Linedata Ltd. is the order management system for equity, foreign exchange and fixed-income trading. FlexTrade from Flextrade Systems Inc. is used as the execution management system for equities and foreign exchange instruments.

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 Assets

Yardi Voyager delivered and hosted by Yardi Systems, B.V. is the investment book of records solution for unlisted real estate and renewable energy infrastructure investments.

Green Street provides commercial real estate analytics.

Credit Ratings

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

• Fitch Solutions Ltd.
• Moody’s Analytics UK Ltd.
• 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 Protecht delivered by Protecht Ltd.

IT Operations

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