Max Life Pension Fund Management Ltd (MLPF), a recent entrant in pension fund management space, is on a scaling up mode, aiming to onboard atleast 400 corporates this financial year, Ranbheer Singh Dhariwal, Chief Executive Officer has said.
In 2023-24, which was the company’s first full year of operations, as many as 105 corporates were onboarded out of which 80 were new to National Pension System (NPS), Dhariwal told Businessline here in an interview.
This company is also looking to ramp up its individual NPS subscriber count from 8,500 now to about 30,000 by end March 2025, he added.
MLPF, which is a subsidiary of Max Life Insurance, will soon launch a facility for all customers (both retail and corporate) to achieve seamless onboarding to NPS via WhatsApp.
“We are looking to enable opening of NPS account through WhatsApp. We will unveil onboarding with WhatsApp this quarter. That will give us scale and we want to reach the masses”, Dhariwal said.
MLPF had in August 2022 secured its Commencement of Business certificate from the pension regulator Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA).
Assets under management
The company had ended March 31, 2024, with an assets under management (AUM) of ₹576 crore, of which nearly 45 per cent has come through the Equity scheme opted by subscribers. In end March 2023, MLPF’s assets under management stood at ₹ 144 crore.
Dhariwal said that the company is keen to in the next few years be among the top five pension fund managers by incremental assets under management (AUM).
“ We don’t see ourselves as a late entrant in the pension management space. The market is large. If you focus on the right things, AUMs will come”, he said.
Currently there are eleven PFRDA-approved pension fund managers in the country. As many as three new players — Max Life, Tata Pension Fund Management and Axis —had entered the pension fund management space in 2022 and have commenced operations. Later DSP Pensions became the 11th player after it received its certificate of registration in September 2023.
Dhariwal said that the focus of MLPF in the initial days was to build the infrastructure “so that we can go out in the market and differentiate ourselves”.
Despite being the youngest Pension Fund Management firm, MLPF had differentiated itself by recently launching a WhatsApp bot (NPS Mitra) for servicing of customer queries.
“Biggest challenge when we meet people is that they couldn’t remember their PRAN number. On the bot we said we don’t need your PRAN number, all you have to do is have your PAN number. We validate through your PAN and give them eight different services that covers 70 percent of service request from the CRA side. We have brought convenience to customers”, Dhariwal added.
“We also saw that lot of people are not aware about NPS. We have created FAQs on NPS Mitra that is conveniently available to all”.
MLPF also plans to have a standalone agency force. “We have 150 agents and want to expand on that. Our pitch is you can’t miss on NPS as a product if you are a financial advisor”, Dhariwal said.
PoP licence
MLPF does both pension fund management as well as serves as a Points of Presence (distributor of NPS). The company got its PoP licence in February last year.
Last year Max Life Insurance’s MD & CEO Prashant Tripathy had said that Max Life Pension Management was targeting AUM of ₹ 15,000 crore in five years, and aiming for ₹1-lakh crore in the next 10 years.
Over the last two decades, there has been robust growth in National Pension System (NPS), which has exceeded ₹ 11.7 lakh crore and growing at a CAGR of about 25-30 per cent.
To encourage wider participation, the PFRDA had also given incentives for private players in the retirement space, giving more flexibility on fees that was low till recently.Although India’s pension assets to GDP is still low, economy watchers expect the country’s overall retirement space to make rapid strides in the coming decades.
