Jan Collier

Jan Petter Collier (born 30 June 1950 in Oslo) is one of Norway's best-known financiers. He trained as a business economist (siviløkonom), with studies associated with the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and worked in several banking roles before striking out on his own. In 1983 he founded his own stockbroking firm, and in 1984 he partnered with Dagfinn Sundal to create Sundal Collier & Co. The firm merged with Sweden's ABG Securities in 2001 to form ABG Sundal Collier, today a leading Nordic investment bank with offices across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the UK and the US.

Collier led the house through its formative decades — serving as Executive Chairman from 1992 to 2004 and as Chief Executive Officer until October 2010, when Knut Brundtland succeeded him. He returned to the board as a director in 2012 and has been Deputy Chairman since 30 April 2019. As of 2024 he remains the firm's largest single owner, and in 2023 he appeared on Kapital magazine's list of the 400 wealthiest people in Norway.

Away from the bank, Collier runs his personal capital through the family holding company Sanden AS (also referenced as Sanden Equity), which is structured around his two adult children, son Petter Collier and daughter Margrethe Collier Høegh, in part to avoid conflicts of interest with the bank. Through Sanden the family has at times held an equity portfolio worth close to NOK 1.2 billion, concentrated in a handful of large positions — most famously a stake of roughly 3.5 million shares in the edtech company Kahoot!, alongside holdings in ABG Sundal Collier and Aker.

Collier is also one of Norway's most prominent private art collectors, having assembled one of the country's largest collections of Nordic contemporary art, reportedly worth several hundred million kroner. He is married to Kari and has two children and four grandchildren.

• Runs a concentrated, long-horizon portfolio through Sanden AS — deliberately "a few large stock investments rather than many small ones."
• Three stated guiding principles: invest in long-term quality companies; do not hedge currency; and do not take on debt — with the no-debt rule described as the most important of the three.
• Core exposure is Nordic listed equities, with edtech (Kahoot!), financials and industrials (Aker) as signature holdings.
• Willing to back early-stage Norwegian companies privately as one of a small syndicate of experienced private investors, but this is opportunistic rather than a systematic seed program.
• The "angel / seed" framing overstates a formal early-stage mandate: Collier is primarily a public-markets and family-office investor who selectively joins private rounds.