”Sustainable investments require transparency and visibility”

What is Seeqest?

– Seeqest is a tool that provides visibility to how our occupational pensions are invested. The user logs on to the app with their BankID and scans their occupational pension fund holdings. Seeqest wants to be a knowledge and information provider for the user, who decides where to place their investments.

– Occupational pension capital is sometimes referred to as ‘unseen capital’ because few are aware that they have this money, and even fewer know how it is invested. Seeqest works flat out so that the user, through exercising their right to transfer, will be able to divest their holdings in industries and companies that do not reflect their values. People now have the power to influence societal development through their pension savings.

What is wrong with how pension capital is invested today?

– Today, nine out of ten Swedes have an occupational pension, and the occupational pension capital equals approximately SEK 2,700 billion, an amount more than half of Sweden’s GNP. Using surveys and market data, we can see that the market funds do not reflect the savers’ values. Seventy per cent of all pension funds have, for example, investments in fossil fuels.

– To be able to make demands and control our investments, we need transparency and visibility into where our occupational pension is invested, which is no easy task today. Now we are changing that. Through transparency, visibility and the ability to redirect capital, we can accelerate the necessary transition to a more sustainable world.

Already today there are various ethical and green funds. How does what you make possible differ from these funds?

– It is not always easy to understand what the ethical and environmental labelling of funds actually stands for today. Today’s standard allows pension funds with a certain percentage of, for example, fossil fuel and nuclear weapons holdings to still be called sustainable.

– Seeqest’s categories and scanning take a zero-tolerance approach to such holdings, which means our app’s results can differ from what the pension companies promise.

Catharina Lehto was interviewed by Gabriella Linderoth and Oscar Almqvist, interns at New Republic. ‘Three Quick Questions…’ is a series of interviews conducted by New Republic.