ZF English

First mandatory private pension contributions transferred on May 20

05.05.2008, 18:05 15

The first contributions to mandatory pension funds will be transferred on May 20, and they will be worth more than 37 million euros, given that there are more than 4.1 million contributors, the average gross salary stands at 450 euros and the contribution paid from this salary stands at 2%.
According to a regulation issued by the Private Pension System Supervision Commission, the monthly contributions to the pension fund will be transferred by the Pension Office until the 20th of the next month.
May 20 therefore becomes the starting moment of the private pensions, as this is the first month when part of the employees' contributions toward pensions will no longer go to the state but to private managers. Each employee that joined a mandatory pension fund thus becomes the owner of his own contributions, and has his own account, unlike now, when contributions made by employees towards the social security system are used right away to pay the pensions.
For instance, an employee whose gross average salary stands at 450 euros will have about 63 euros in his account by the end of the year, which will be the contribution transferred to the pension fund alone, without taking into account the investment yield.
In case of a person that earns a 900-euro gross salary, for instance, the value of the contributions paid this year will stand at 126 euros, and reach 270 euros in 2009. Over the next five years, that is until the end of 2012, the privately managed pension funds will collect at least 4.6 billion euros, reveals an analysis by ZF based on the data from the National Statistics Institute, The National Forecast Commission and the National Pension Office.
Pension funds will see more than 273 million euros reach their accounts by the end of 2008, while the value of contributions will exceed 664 million euros next year and come close to one billion euros in 2010.
Over the next eight years, the share of the contribution that private pension funds will manage will increase by 0.5% a year to 6% of the gross salary. At the same time, the number of contributors will increase by about 100,000 a year, according to the estimates of the private pension fund managers. Pension funds are therefore engaged in a constant battle for billions of euros, which will make a significant impact on the financial market, because they will be invested on the Stock Exchange, in deposits, in government securities and other financial instruments.
In the fourth year after collection started, the revenues of the private pension managers will exceed one billion euros, reaching 1.2 billion euros, and in the fifth year, these revenues will overshoot the 1.5 billion-euro mark. These amounts are only the annual revenues of the pension funds, without taking into account the yields of the investments the managers will make.
There are 16 pension fund managers on the mandatory pension market. The competition for customers started with 18 funds but two of them, Marfin and Zepter, have recently requested the Private Pension Commission that their licence should be withdrawn. The biggest managers of mandatory pensions on the domestic market are ING, Allianz-Tiriac and Generali, which account for about 80% of the total number of clients.

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