NBIM Brand Guidelines: Norway’s Oil Fund Manager, Set Up in 1998, and Its Exclusion List

A North Sea field, a 1990 law and a manager set up in 1998.

NBIM is short for Norges Bank Investment Management, the part of Norway’s central bank that manages the Government Pension Fund Global, the fund Norwegians call the Oil Fund. Its own history begins with oil. In 1969 the Ekofisk field was found in the North Sea, and production started in 1971, NBIM’s published timeline says. In 1983 a government committee chaired by Hermod Skånland, a former Norges Bank governor, proposed a fund in which the state could store the temporary rush of oil revenue and spend only the real return.

The Norwegian parliament passed the law creating the Government Petroleum Fund in 1990. The first money arrived in 1996, transferred by the Ministry of Finance and, as NBIM puts it, invested in the same way as the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves: entirely outside Norway. In 1997 the ministry decided that 40 percent should go into equities, and on 1 January 1998 Norges Bank Investment Management was set up to manage the fund on the ministry’s behalf. The fund took its present name in 2006, according to both NBIM and English Wikipedia. Despite that name, Wikipedia notes, it is not a pension fund in the usual sense: it is financed by petroleum income, not by pension contributions.

Norwegian Wikipedia names NBIM’s chief executives: Knut Kjær from the start in 1998 to the end of 2007, Yngve Slyngstad from 1 January 2008, and Nicolai Tangen, hired in March 2020 and in post from that September. NBIM also manages most of Norges Bank’s foreign exchange reserves. A separate and older fund, the Government Pension Fund Norway, dates from 1967 and is run by Folketrygdfondet rather than by NBIM, English Wikipedia says.

From government bonds to Regent Street and wind farms.

The fund’s growth is a record of a widening mandate. NBIM’s timeline lists the steps: five emerging markets added to its equity benchmark in 2000, corporate bonds in 2002, the equity share raised from 40 to 60 percent in 2007, and real estate allowed from 2008. Its first property investment, in 2011, was a 25 percent stake in The Crown Estate’s Regent Street properties in London; it bought its first buildings in the United States in 2013, in New York, Washington and Boston, and its first in Asia in 2017, in Tokyo. In April 2021 it announced its first investment in unlisted renewable energy infrastructure, half of the Borssele 1 & 2 wind farm in the Netherlands.

Today NBIM says it manages more than 22,000 billion kroner, and that the fund owns almost 1.5 percent of all shares in the world’s listed companies, in about 7,100 companies, with roughly 700 staff from 40 countries in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore. Its timeline says the fund first passed one trillion dollars in 2017 and 20,000 billion kroner in December 2024. Under the fiscal rule, NBIM explains, the government is on average to spend only the equivalent of the fund’s real return, estimated at around 3 percent a year.

The most public part of its work is ethical. Ethical guidelines for the fund were set in 2004, and English Wikipedia dates the Council on Ethics to a royal decree of 19 November 2004. In January 2010 the Ministry of Finance announced that 17 tobacco companies had been excluded. From 2015, NBIM’s timeline says, the council sent its recommendations directly to Norges Bank, whose Executive Board decided on exclusion or “observation.” NBIM publishes the resulting list on its website, company by company, with the criterion and the date of each decision. In 2019 the Peterson Institute for International Economics gave the fund a score of 100 on its sovereign wealth fund transparency scoreboard, ranking it first of 64 funds, English Wikipedia reports.

Design and documentation.

Sovereign wealth funds and large public pension investors rarely advertise. They manage money for governments or for pension members rather than for retail customers, and their public identity is built mostly from documents: annual reports, responsible-investment reports, governance pages and press releases about individual deals. Norway’s oil fund publishes a year-by-year timeline of its own growth; Singapore’s GIC publishes a report each July with its 20-year returns, while explaining on its website why it does not disclose the size of its assets.

Their websites tend to be restrained. They lead with a mandate — preserving national wealth, paying pensions, investing for future generations — and support it with portfolio overviews, lists of holdings, leadership pages and statements of values. Several also publish stewardship material: how they vote at company meetings, how they engage with boards, and which companies they have excluded or placed under observation, and why. NBIM’s exclusion list, which gives a criterion and a date for each company, is one example.

Their physical presence is usually a handful of offices in financial districts rather than shops or products. NBIM lists offices in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore; English Wikipedia describes GIC’s network of 11 offices in financial capitals. What the public sees of them is mostly a name or a set of initials, a limited palette, and pages of text and charts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each institution — when it was founded, who owns it, what it is mandated to do and how it presents itself — using dated sources and the institutions’ own words, attributed as such. Occasionally one steps outside that register, as GIC did in October 2026 with The Secret Vault, a public exhibition marking its 45th anniversary.

An ethics process on hold, and deals that continue.

That ethics process has been on hold. NBIM’s exclusion page says the Executive Board decided on exclusions until November 2025. Since then, under temporary guidelines from the Ministry of Finance, Norges Bank does not take new decisions to exclude or observe companies, though it may revoke earlier ones, and the Council on Ethics continues to monitor the portfolio; the list was last updated on 11 August 2026, the page says. A state commission led by Svein Gjedrem, a former head of Norges Bank, handed its proposals for a new ethical framework to the finance minister on 15 October 2026. News in English reported the same day that the proposals drew sharp criticism and that the report would go through a hearing before the government puts forward its own proposal.

Its investing continues. On 4 November 2026 NBIM announced that it had acquired a direct 10 percent interest in Aypa Power, a North American battery storage platform, as a co-investor alongside Brookfield, adding to an indirect holding through a Brookfield fund. The agreement was signed and completed on 28 October 2026, NBIM said, describing it as the fund’s first direct investment in battery storage.

NBIM’s public face is sober. Its website, nbim.no, leads with the fund’s value, its investments and its responsible-investment pages. It publishes reports, a section listing all the fund’s investments, a plan called “Strategy 28” and a podcast, In Good Company, in which Tangen interviews the leaders of some of the world’s largest companies. It names excellence, integrity and innovation among its values, and says it remains a small, flexible organisation despite the size of the fund.

For a design guide, NBIM shows an identity assembled from published material: a timeline, a list of holdings and a list of exclusions. Compare GIC, the manager of Singapore’s reserves, and Brookfield Asset Management, its partner on Aypa Power. For this guide we use a deep fjord blue and a granite grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NBIM’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.