Corporate pension fund guidelines on the anvil

The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority board met here and approved a proposal to this effect, thereby extending the role of the regulator which currently manages the pension fund of individual employees under the New Pension System.
“For managing corpus of corporates, norms would be announced within a month as it was approved in Wednesday’s PFRDA board meeting,” a Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) official told PTI.

The PFRDA move came after large employers like the State Bank of India and Himachal Road Transport Corporation (HRTC) had approached the regulator to work out a separate guideline for management of their employees’ pension funds. Also, some self-help groups and one or two PSUs had approached PFRDA for the management of their corpus.  The NPS was implemented for those government employees who joined service on or after January 1 2004. On May 1 this year, it was extended to all citizens. There are six fund managers for all citizens’ scheme— IDFC Mutual Fund, Kotak Mahindra, SBI, UTI Asset Management, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and Reliance MF-to manage the corpus of customers. Besides, there are 21 Points of Presence (PoPs) of NPS, which include, State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Axis Bank and Union Bank of India. PoPs are contact and collection points for customers who want to be a part of NPS. The PFRDA is also holding discussion with the postal department which is likely to be the next Point of Presence.