A prime example of Prime Finance

At its core, Prime Finance is about helping funds and institutions find efficient financing solutions for their daily trading activities. As the only prime finance house in the Nordics, SEB has an extensive offering within the field, catering to even the most complex needs.

Hedge funds, pension funds, and other financial institutions typically have plenty of assets under management. In their pursuit to make the daily trading run smoothly – and maximise returns – reliable financing solutions are essential. And this is precisely what SEB provides, through its Prime Finance services.

“Everything we do is aimed at providing our clients with the most efficient, flexible, and cost-efficient ways to finance their trading activities”, says Fredrik Beyer, Head of Prime Finance Origination and Sales at SEB.

The bank’s toolbox is voluminous. Naturally, it includes regular lending, allowing clients a chance to increase their returns through borrowed capital – so called leveraged exposure. It also contains, for example, stock lending. This comes in handy when a client wants to bet on the price of a specific stock dropping, by “going short”.

“We offer the complete package. We provide sales and origination services, which entail speaking to clients daily, keeping track of the markets and finding the best possible financing solutions for them. Furthermore, we do stock lending and have our prime brokerage client service team, which is responsible for taking care of any sort of post trade business”, Beyer continues.

Erik Grahn, Head of Prime Finance at SEB, underlines the large scale of the bank’s operations within the field. “Among the Nordic banks, we are unique in having a complete offering aimed at financial institutions, and the capability to conduct thousands of daily transactions in a fully automated manner. We help asset managers, asset owners and banks connect, to enhance the liquidity in especially Nordic equities trading.”

He continues: “Altogether, we have a lot of clients, and we have built our offering to cater for several different needs – short exposure, long exposure, borrowing cash. In addition, we have multiple ways of interacting with these clients. We have API-solutions for placing orders, they can call directly to our desk, and they can also send electronic files that are compatible with our systems.”

It is not only trading in Nordic equities that SEB supports, however: “We provide all our services on a European level as well, and to a certain extent also in the US. Then again, the Nordics are our home markets, and we take extra pride in being the best in the world at providing services based on Nordic equities”, Beyer says.

Why should large financial institutions pay attention to Nordic equities, in your opinion?

“There are several reasons. For one, the Nordic equity markets stand for about four per cent of the global markets, so if you are an investment manager looking to have global exposure, a certain share of your portfolio will need to be allocated to the Nordics. Furthermore, there are plenty of interesting companies here”, Grahn says. 

Beyer agrees: “If you look at small and midcap companies’ share of the overall stock market value, it is higher in the Nordics. This is also the segment where asset managers often can find companies that perform better than their share price would imply. Lastly, I think that the overall stability of the Nordic region is a plus for investors”, he concludes.

Article published: 3 June 2025