PFRDA to decide on pension fund managers for private sector NPS today

The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) will open commercial bids for selection of eight pension fund managers for
managing the corpus under the New Pension Fund (NPS) in the private sector, a day earlier than the earlier scheduled 28 March.

Accordingly PFRDA has amended the Request for Proposal (RFP) for selection of pension funds (PFs) under NPS for private sector issued on 16 January 2014.

The NPS is applicable to employees in the private sector as well as those in the public sector who voluntarily opt for this product.

The pension fund regulator has now taken an auction route to decide on the pension fund managers who will get to manage the New Pension System (NPS) corpus against the September 2012 decision to increase the commission to 0.25 per cent of the assets under management from 0.0102 per cent of AUM.

PFRDA had then proposed to allow any technically qualified fund management entity to manage pension funds under NPS provided they are ready to work with a fee cap of 0.25 per cent of the AUM.

Under the auction system, pension fund managers will have to quote the lowest return on AUM to secure the mandate for managing the funds.

PFRDA, however, has not specified any floor or a cap for the fee structure, industry sources said.

Meanwhile, the assets under management in the private sector NPS has swelled to about Rs2,600 crore now from a level of Rs400 crore in September 2012.