Brokers brought only 5% of voluntary pension funds’ participants
Brokers intermediated only 4.92% of the total contracts (clients) concluded by the seven voluntary private pension funds (pillar III) by the end of February this year, according to the data provided by the Private Pension Supervisory Commission (CSSPP).
Actually, brokers brought only 3,444 of the 70,000 active participants to the voluntary pension system, present at the end of February. Calculated by the customers’ net assets, brokers had an even smaller input, of only 3.81% from the market’s assets.
The brokers’ largest contribution, in terms of participants to this system, is seen in the “Pensia mea” fund, managed by AVIVA. 37% of the 5,513 participants to this fund at the end of February were brought in by brokers. At the opposite end, we have two funds with zero sales from brokers: ING Optim (managed by ING Life Insurance) and OTP Strateg (managed by OTP Garancia).
ALLIANZ-TIRIAC Private Pensions did not have significant sales through brokers either: the two funds (AZT Moderato and AZT Vivace) had sales below 1% from the brokers on the market. Only BCR Prudent (managed by BCR Life Insurance) and ING Clasic (ING Life Insurance) had sales from brokers that amounted to 3%-4% of the total clients.
“Usually, brokers are not specialized for such products. Selling mandatory pensions is entirely different than selling voluntary pensions. You need to persuade not just the individual to buy a voluntary pension, but also the employer, who needs to understand the system’s benefits. Most brokers focused their activity on mandatory pension so far, very few went back to the voluntary ones by now. This is why the administrators don’t have yet an idea about the broker’s ability to bring participants to the voluntary pension system”, states Mihai SEITAN, director general of FINCOP pension broker.
FINCOP was the second mandatory pension broker, with more than 156,000 clients validated after the sales campaign. FINCOP is now starting to sell voluntary pensions as well, according to SEITAN, through FINCOP Insurance Broker (run by Romeo JANTEA).
“We haven’t started to actually sell on pillar III, but we already signed two contracts, one with ALLIANZ-TIRIAC Private Pensions, and another one with ING Life Insurance, for the distribution of these voluntary pension products”, added SEITAN.
