The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway has published a supervisory report on Storebrand Bank ASA's marketing of funds on kron.no, concluding that sustainability information on the site was misleading. Ratings that measured how sustainability factors could affect a fund's return, meaning sustainability risk, were presented as if they showed how sustainable the fund's investments were. The authority also found that funds subject to Article 8 disclosures under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, or SFDR, were presented in a way that could make them appear more sustainable than the underlying basis supported. The review found that Morningstar globe ratings were shown under a sustainability heading and described in text as indicating how sustainable a fund's investments were, even though they actually related to sustainability risk. A separate carbon risk rating was also considered insufficiently clear, because simply referring to risk was not enough to ensure that ordinary investors would understand the metric concerned potential effects on returns rather than the sustainability characteristics of the fund itself. In addition, filtering funds by SFDR Articles 6, 8 and 9 under a sustainability label, including describing Article 8 as a medium level, created the impression that those categories represented defined levels of sustainability. The authority said that was misleading because Article 8 can also cover funds with limited sustainability characteristics. It stressed that the first impression given to customers must be accurate and that corrective explanations elsewhere would not be enough. Storebrand Bank told the authority it has taken corrective measures and will review its quality assurance and revision processes for published material. Globe ratings and the Article 6, 8 and 9 categories have been removed as separate columns from the fund overview and moved to individual fund pages, the site now states that the SFDR articles concern transparency and reporting requirements rather than a sustainability ranking, and the carbon risk rating has been removed.
Norwegian Finanstilsynet2026-06-24
Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway finds Storebrand Bank website misrepresented sustainability risk ratings and Article 8 funds
The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway found that Storebrand Bank's kron.no website presented sustainability risk ratings as if they measured how sustainable funds were, making the information misleading. It also said the site's treatment of SFDR Article 8 funds could make them appear more sustainable than warranted. Storebrand Bank has changed the website, including removing the carbon risk rating and clarifying that SFDR article labels are not sustainability rankings.