META Sammelstiftung für KMU

META Sammelstiftung für KMU

META Sammelstiftung für KMU was established in Basel as a collective foundation focused exclusively on occupational pensions for small and medium-sized enterprises under Switzerland's second-pillar system. Founders Urs Küng and Kurt Strasser, both former trustees, designed META to operate on a non-profit basis — all asset returns, after statutory reserves, flow back to insured members rather than to shareholders or external carriers. The foundation runs a property-heavy strategy. Direct holdings include a dedicated Swiss Residential Portfolio and commercial assets managed through GALFORT SA, alongside a Global Real Estate Holdings (GREH) SA vehicle domiciled in Luxembourg that adds cross-border exposure. These are supplemented by an Investment Pool 1 based in Basel, suggesting a broader multi-asset capability beyond bricks and mortar. The real estate tilt is structural: Swiss pension regulation permits direct property ownership within collective foundations, and META exploits that fully, keeping asset management internalized and avoiding the fee layers of intermediated products. Scale and team size remain undisclosed. Public records confirm that META has since transferred its legal obligations to Convitus Sammelstiftung für Personalvorsorge, a successor collective foundation that continues serving the same SME constituency. The original investment pools — Swiss Residential, GREH SA, GALFORT SA, Investment Pool 1 — persist as identifiable portfolio components under the new entity, indicating continuity in asset management rather than a clean liquidation. What structurally differentiates META — and now Convitus — from Switzerland's large composite insurers is the non-profit pooling model. Unlike a Swiss Life or AXA Winterthur, where insured SMEs are customers of a for-profit balance sheet, a collective foundation like META aggregates employer contributions into shared investment vehicles and operates at cost. The governance places employers and employee representatives on the board, aligning asset-allocation decisions directly with beneficiary interests rather than with a parent company's earnings targets.