At 50, the Nordic Investment Bank writes security into its mission
A year after opening its balance sheet to weapons and ammunition, the Nordic-Baltic lender has made resilience one of the three things it exists to finance. Its own history suggests this is less of a departure than it looks.
“We cannot be prosperous if we are not secure. We cannot stay secure unless we are prosperous.”
That was Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) President and CEO André Küüsvek, marking the end of an era in which European countries could build prosperity, clean up their environment and leave part of their security to someone else. “That world is no longer around,” he said.
The occasion was NIB’s 50th anniversary seminar at Finlandia Hall, where the bank unveiled a renewed strategy approved by its board that same morning. Its mission is now to strengthen the competitiveness, sustainability and resilience of the Nordic-Baltic region, with the three treated as interdependent. Resilience — the new pillar — will steer where NIB puts its capital, its staff and its risk appetite.
“The changes to it really come to resilience,” Küüsvek said.
From exception to pillar
It is the furthest step yet in a shift that has run fast since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which Küüsvek called a “massive, massive wake-up call.”
NIB revised its Sustainability Policy in 2024 to permit security and defense financing while excluding weapons and ammunition. In July 2025 it changed its exclusion list again to allow conventional weapons and ammunition, keeping controversial weapons off the books. Early deals included a €400 million uncommitted facility for Lithuanian defense investments and a €5 million loan to Finnish communications firm Savox.
When Arctic Today spoke to NIB Vice-President and Head of Lending Jeanette Vitasp at the Arctic Circle Assembly last October, the bank was still learning the sector. Defense companies had little sense of what multilateral lenders consider bankable, and NIB had to get to grips with unfamiliar supply chains and procurement systems. “You could say we’ve been educating each other,” she said then.
What is new is the framing. Resilience now covers “the civil side of things” alongside security, defense, military activity, weapons and ammunition, Küüsvek said, and sits inside the mission rather than beside it.
Not the bank’s first defense loans
The anniversary also produced a reminder that NIB’s founders had fewer qualms about the sector than the mandate the bank adopted in 2005.
Siv Hellén, a NIB lawyer for 35 years, listed the deals the bank was proudest of in its first years: loans to two defense companies in Norway, and to two nuclear power plants in Sweden and Finland. Those were, she said, “among the first loans that we bragged about.”
The frame around such lending keeps moving. NIB was created to finance projects in the “Nordic interest,” a deliberately vague formula retired when the Baltic states joined as equal members in 2005 and replaced by competitiveness and the environment. Former president Henrik Normann described a board willing to override its own green criteria when geopolitics demanded it, approving an LNG terminal in Lithuania when other lenders would not.
“We are not having the mandate written in stone,” Normann said. “It’s not the Ten Commandments.”
Resilience stretches well beyond weapons
Küüsvek defined resilience as the capacity to deter, prepare for, withstand, adapt to and recover from disruption, and listed critical civilian infrastructure, energy security, supply chains, resource access, defense capabilities, space, cyber and military investment as financeable.
Mikael Frisell, head of the Swedish Civil Defence and Resilience Agency, told the seminar that governments cannot manufacture resilience alone, and that Ukraine’s experience shows “we cannot wait and then improvise.”
“Armies don’t win wars, societies do,” he said.
Executives from Scania, Neste and Norwegian grid operator Statnett then described security exposure in sectors previously filed under competitiveness or the green transition. Statnett’s Elisabeth Vike Vardheim warned that Europe’s capacity to manufacture cables and pylons is becoming the binding constraint on grid expansion, and a security problem in itself. Neste’s Heikki Malinen said hyperscale data centers can outbid industry for electricity, threatening the region’s hydrogen ambitions.
Scania’s Christian Levin made the most direct pitch of the afternoon: heavy-truck charging infrastructure is “hardly bankable today,” too long-dated for private capital but a near-certain earner a decade out — exactly the gap NIB exists to fill.
“I see André is making notes,” said NIB board chair Julie Sonne, moderating.
What about the Arctic?
NIB presents the shift as a response to its shareholders rather than a choice of its own. The Board of Governors, the eight member states’ finance ministers, asked for a sharper focus on resilience at its Tallinn meeting in March 2024. The policy changes followed.
“We have asked the bank to help strengthen the resilience and security of our region,” Icelandic Finance Minister Daði Már Kristófersson said, speaking as one of those governors. The categories are converging anyway, he argued: Iceland’s clean energy is at once an environmental asset, an industrial advantage and a matter of national resilience.
The strategy does not single out the Arctic. But most of what NIB now files under resilience: energy security, communications, transport links, supply chains, space and military capability, maps onto the investment gaps northern governments are struggling to close. Vitasp told Arctic Today last year she expected more Arctic investment because of the geopolitical situation, while noting the bank had financed no defense-related projects in the region at that point.
