CSSPP: The growth of the voluntary market - “a slow and lengthy” process
"Earning the population’s confidence in the voluntary pension system is a slow and lengthy process, but the continuous increase in the number of participants and the total net assets of the funds are positive signs for the system’s future”, stated the experts of the Private Pension Supervisory Commission (CSSPP) in the quarterly report on the voluntary private pension market (pillar III) published at the end of last week.
Until recently, all players from the private pension market focused on the mandatory pensions (pillar II), which explains the slow evolution on the voluntary pension market. The number of clients at the end of April was 82,337, namely 49% more than at the end of 2007, but still below the market’s quite optimistic expectations. At the moment, most representatives of the voluntary pension market see it possible to reach a number of 150-200,000 new clients this year, compared to the 55,000 participants they brought in last year.
So far, the sales of voluntary pensions were rather corporate, since this system attracted mainly the employers, who offered the voluntary pension as part of the salary benefits and paid the contribution on behalf of the employees. At the end of March, 68% of the voluntary pension market (according to the number of participants) was corporate, the rest of 32% representing individual clients, who pay the contribution for this saving instrument themselves, without the employer’s participation - according to an analysis conducted exclusively by www.privatepensions.ro.
Also, the CSSPP statistics show that brokers had, so far, a minor contribution to the market’s development: at the end of February, only 5% of the payers and 4% of the voluntary pension funds’ assets got into the system through brokers and intermediaries on this market.
