Insights

Two new listed chief executives, and neither was chosen by the board that will supervise them. Four finance seats moved, and not one went to a first-time CFO.

On 3 August, Aspo named the chief executive of a company that will not trade until January. On 31 August, UPM's shareholders elected the board of one that will not trade until November, six weeks after its chief executive had already been named. Both appointments were internal. Neither went through a search.

According to Listeds Executive Intelligence, Nordic listed companies recorded 57 board and management changes in August: 51 in management teams and 6 at board level. Boards accounted for roughly one change in ten for a second consecutive month — and most of the board activity that did happen was produced by corporate structure rather than by nomination committees. Every one of the month's larger moves was at a Helsinki issuer or at a Helsinki issuer's Nordic subsidiary.

The demergers set the month's bookends

Aspo's board approved the demerger plan separating ESL Shipping into a new listed company on 3 August and appointed Matti-Mikael Koskinen as chief executive of ESL Shipping Group Plc the same day. Koskinen has run ESL Shipping Ltd since 2013. The demerger completes on 31 December, trading is expected to start on or about 4 January 2027, and the company's own board will not be elected until an extraordinary general meeting on 7 December, four months after its chief executive was named. Rolf Jansson, Aspo's chief executive, is intended to be elected chair.

At the other end of the month, UPM's extraordinary general meeting on 31 August approved the plywood demerger and elected WISA Group Plc's board: Tapio Korpeinen as chair, Mats Nordlander as deputy chair, and Sakari Ahdekivi, Frank Herrmann, Nina Kiviranta and Emmanuelle Picard as members. Tuija Suur-Hamari had been named WISA's President and CEO six weeks earlier, on 16 July. The demerger is expected to complete on or about 31 October, with trading from 2 November, nine weeks after the board was seated.

Under the Finnish Corporate Governance Code, appointing the chief executive is the board's own duty. A demerger inverts that sequence, and there is no other way to staff a company that does not yet exist. The consequence, on this author's reading rather than anything either company has said, is that both new boards take office with their most consequential appointment already made, and their first exercise of that duty will be a review rather than a choice.

One thing the WISA sequence does change: Suur-Hamari will be one of a small number of women running a Helsinki-listed company. Listeds’ CEO Index — Finland | Q2 2026 shows women holding 8.1 per cent of the 186 sitting chief executive roles at 30 June, and one of the 25 first-half starts. Women held 8.1 per cent of the 186 sitting chief executive roles at 30 June, and one of the 25 first-half starts. August added a second name to that pipeline — Elli Siltala, appointed chief executive of Raisio plc on 7 August.

The finance seat moved sideways, or not at all

The month's finance moves were the mirror image of a market hiring new talent into the role.

Digia filled its chief financial officer seat on 5 August by taking Vincit's sitting CFO, Kärkkäinen — the second time since 2017 that Digia has filled the role with a sitting CFO from another Nasdaq Helsinki company. Bioretec named Panu Mikkonen chief financial officer from 6 October, the fourth person named to that seat since September 2025, two of them interim. Kempower appointed Juha Jaatinen interim chief financial officer on 13 August. 

No Helsinki company promoted a first-time chief financial officer into the role in August. 

Eight executives named in two days

Three companies named eight executives across 18 and 19 August.

Nordea's 19 August release did two things at once. It merged Group Risk and Group Compliance into a single function under Mark Kandborg, who continues on the Group Leadership Team, with Nahale Ståhl Hallengren as Chief Compliance Officer from the same date, outside the Group Leadership Team. And it filled leadership in the bank's two largest customer units: Per Långsved, who joined Nordea in 2019 as Head of Personal Banking Sweden and Country Senior Executive, becomes Head of Personal Banking and joins the Group Leadership Team; Randi Marjamaa, at Nordea since 2006, takes a newly created Business Banking leadership post and also joins the Group Leadership Team. Sara Mella steps back from operational roles.

Nightingale Health removed its operating chief's role on 19 August and put two commercial chiefs in its place, at the point where its Americas business needs to produce revenue. Janna Ranta, chief operating officer since May 2025, became Chief Commercial Officer, Research and Healthcare. Hugh Watson, who has spent 25 years in United States laboratory diagnostics, joined from outside as Chief Commercial Officer, Americas.

Finnair named its digital and legal chiefs on 18 August. With those two, four of the nine Executive Board functions — people, digital, legal and finance — have a new holder named in 2026. The chief executive, operating, revenue, customer and communications seats have not moved. The rebuild is running from the strongest quarter Finnair has reported, and from a general meeting that rejected the company's remuneration report with 90 per cent of the votes represented against it.

In the first half of 2026, BlackRock's ownership grew in eight of the ten Finnish listed companies where its position is visible. Two of those increases were announced. The other six were not, because Finnish law only asks for an announcement when a holding crosses a reporting threshold. The lowest is 5 per cent, and none of these crossed it.

Ownership gained between the end of December 2025 and the end of June 2026, in basis points, with the number of BlackRock announcements each company published alongside. Register figures are drawn from Listeds executive intelligence.

* For Metso, Orion and Stora Enso the readings are the holdings reported at the crossings closest to each end of the window: Metso 12 February and 30 June, Orion 5 January and 17 June, Stora Enso beginning of January and 26 June. Nordea's second reading is end-July 2026; all other companies are 31 December 2025 to 30 June 2026. Nordea discloses its major shareholders rounded to the nearest 0.1 million shares (e.g. 194.6 million shares), so the share counts and changes shown for Nordea are approximations.

Basis points of ownership are used here because they survive the two things that distort share counts, dilution and buybacks, and because they mean the same thing to a chair and to a portfolio manager. One caution before reading the table: the three companies with announcements are measured as combined holdings, shares plus financial instruments, as filed. The seven others are measured as shares registered in BlackRock's own name.

Four of the five biggest increases, ranks two through five, produced no announcement at all, and 77 basis points of ownership changed hands across those four companies in silence.The 47 announcements cluster at the two ends of the table, at rank one and rank nine.

Metso gained 42 basis points without changing the percentage of shares held

Metso's share holding reads 4.98 per cent on 12 February and 4.98 per cent on 30 June. Identical to the second decimal across four and a half months, on a net movement of 39,519 shares. Over the same period the holding through financial instruments went from 0.09 to 0.52 per cent, taking the combined position from 5.08 to 5.50 per cent.

That is the largest increase in exposure to any Finnish listed company in this dataset, and a share register would not show it. Metso published eight announcements while it happened, each one describing a line being crossed rather than a position being built.

Stora Enso published twenty times and ended the half exactly where it started

At the beginning of January the Stora Enso holding read 4.26 per cent in shares and 0.73 per cent through financial instruments, 5.00 per cent in total. On 26 June: 3.81 per cent in shares, 1.19 per cent through financial instruments. Total, 5.00 per cent. The shares fell forty-five basis points, the financial instruments rose forty-six, and twenty announcements describe the round trip.

Orion is the only one of the three where the share holding itself crossed the line, from 4.97 per cent on 5 January to 5.01 per cent on 17 June, with financial instruments marginal throughout at 0.02 to 0.09 per cent. Nineteen announcements, eleven basis points.

For three years, the reinvention of the marketing chief into a growth owner has been reshaping the C-suite of America's Fortune 500. Finland's listed-company management teams never carried many CMOs to begin with, yet the same shift is now surfacing on Nasdaq Helsinki, and it arrives as a question for boards and CEOs, not for marketing.

On 15 September 2025, the Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer role at Rebl Group ended. Among the Chief titles the small-cap group kept was a different one: Chief Growth Officer. Taken alone, it is a single management change at one listed company. Taken against the wider record, it is one of the clearest Finnish instances yet of a shift documented at scale in the United States.
On 7 July 2026, Forrester published its third annual analysis of marketing leadership in the Fortune 500. Marketing executives who sit on the top team or report to the CEO are now found at 52% of F500 companies, down from 58% a year earlier.

The "chief marketing officer" title itself is used by just 36%, down from 49% in a single year. Forrester's Ian Bruce argues the decline reading misses the point: the role is not disappearing, it is being reinvented into chief growth officer, chief commercial officer and chief customer officer, giving one leader accountability for growth across the whole customer lifecycle.

Finland barely had CMOs to lose on the management teams

The temptation is to read this as an American story. Across the 188 companies actively listed on Nasdaq Helsinki and First North, seven have a standalone Chief Marketing Officer (not seven percent, seven companies), and not one of them is a large cap. All 33 Finnish large caps have zero. Where Forrester is tracking the CMO's decline at the top of the US market, the top of the Finnish market had already finished that decline before the story began.

But the absence of the CMO title is the wrong thing to fix on. The part of the American trend that matters is not the marketing chief leaving; it is where the growth mandate goes next, and who at the top table is made to own the number. On that question, the change is visible in Finland too.

Rebl kept a growth title where a marketing one used to sit. Raute appointed Arto Kaikkola as Chief Commercial Officer effective 5 May 2026, a seat that folds sales, marketing, communications and commercial excellence into a single owner. And the inflow follows the same shape, though not the same title. Of nine senior marketing hires across Finnish listed companies in 2025 and 2026, only one — Framery's acting CMO — holds a marketing-only Chief title. Two more reached Chief level with marketing bundled into something else: sustainability at Gofore, commercial duties at Raute. The remaining six arrived below Chief level entirely, as EVPs, SVPs, VPs or a Director. The new senior marketing hire in Finland rarely gets a Chief title of any kind, let alone a marketing-only one.

Where the CMO title does survive, it clusters among recent arrivals. Companies that listed in 2021 or later carry a standalone CMO at four times the rate of those listed earlier (9% against 2%), and hold any Chief-level marketing seat at more than triple the rate (16% against 5%). But this is not evidence that going public designs the role in: in three of the five recent-listing CMOs the title predates the IPO, so the pattern is really the marketing title fading among long-listed incumbents, not newer companies inventing it. For boards, that is the point. The growth-ownership question is sharpest exactly where most of the market sits, at the long-established companies that have already let the marketing title go.

Leadership activity eased in June, but companies continued adding senior executives as board changes fell sharply following the AGM season.

According to Listeds data, Finnish listed companies recorded 69 board and management changes during the month, down 26% from May's 93 changes. Boards accounted for 18 changes, a 53% decline from May, while management teams recorded 51 changes, down just 7% month over month.

The figures suggest that the annual governance cycle has largely run its course. After April's extensive board renewal and May's return to executive hiring, June was characterized by targeted leadership appointments aimed at strengthening operating teams rather than reshaping governance.

Board renewal slows after AGM season

Board activity declined sharply from the previous two months, with changes concentrated in only a handful of companies rather than spread across the Finnish listed market.

Summa Defence recorded the month's largest board renewal with 10 board changes after shareholders ordered a special audit into the company's finances and replaced the entire board, as reported by Listeds earlier. Juha Pinomaa was appointed chair alongside new members Ville Jaakonsalo, Ville Heikkinen, Tapani Kiiski, Jyrki Heinimaa, and Mikko Haapala. 

Biotech company Biohit followed with three board changes, appointing Kari Syrjänen as chair and Anssi Kariola as a board member. Car dealership Wetteri added Aarne Simula, the largest shareholder, to its board while Mika Aho assumed the role of chair, continuing the leadership renewal that has characterized the company lately. Listeds reported in June that Simula has returned as CEO while Wetteri plans to return to a positive adjusted operating profit this year. QPR Software also strengthened its board with the appointment of Patrik Sallner. 

The pattern differed from the previous two months. Rather than broad-based board renewal across the market, June's governance changes were concentrated in a handful of companies.