THE RISE IN PENSION ASSETS-Odunze Reginald

 

 Picture credited to Google pension images

Recently, the National Pension Commission, PenCom, announced that the pension assets has hit 4.5 Trillion Naira, and also stated that the operators in the scheme has 20 PFAs, 4PFCs, 7CPFAs, 19AES,and more  recently the Police Pension Fund.

The astronomical increase in pension assets at the point of writing this article may far in be excess of 4.7 Trillion, may have been necessitated by the strict oversight functions of PenCom, the body vested by the provisions of the Pension Reform Act as being responsible for the supervision and control of the Pension Fund Administrators, Pension Fund Custodians and other relevant players in the scheme.

The recent amendment of the 2004 Pension Reform Act, which resulted in its repeal and the subsequent provisions of the Pension Reform Act 2014 will positively consolidate more on the pension assets as the relevant portions of the law has increased the coverage to states, local governments, and employers with minimum of three employees.

What these portends is that of sustainability , a market deepening and expansion which will definitely results in Larger pension assets. But market deepening and expansion has its problems which includes handling the issue of customer service delivery and incidence of high technological cost.

Technology is a paramount necessity in all spheres of business life and pension cannot be an exception, linked to technology is the issue of customer service delivery as the market deepening will come with it, a larger customer base waiting to be serviced on a regular bases.

But far from these, the increase in Pension Assets will definitely results in large investible funds for the real sector and infrastructure, but the idea of investing in real sector and infrastructure comes with it a myriad of problems like corruption, inflation of contracts, kick back just to mention a few, what then do we do as corruption or fraudulent practices may results in the retiree not able to access his funds at the point of retirement.