BCR Pensii is the first company in Romania to be authorised by the Financial Supervisory Authority (ASF) as an administrator of Pillar IV occupational pension funds, the company announced on Tuesday.
Pillar IV is an optional pension scheme employers can use to provide additional benefits to employees during their employment in the form of a contribution in order for them to be able to draw an occupational pension.
Pillar IV is a pension scheme in which each company that decides to participate is under the obligation to offer the product to all its employees and to transfer contributions to their account, but it also has the freedom to establish different amounts of own contribution for each employee against criteria such as seniority, position held or pay.
A specific feature of Pillar IV is the vesting clause, which assumes that employees become the owners of the amounts accumulated at the expiration of a maximum period of three years, provided that the report on the basis of which the contributions were paid by the employer is still in force.
The possibility to manage an occupational pension fund belongs exclusively to an administrator authorised for this purpose by the Financial Supervisory Authority.
At this moment, BCR Pensii is the only company in Romania authorised to offer Pillar IV to state-owned or privately-owned companies. BCR Pensii manages net assets of over 6.6 billion lei and has over 857,000 participants - cumulative data for FPAP BCR and FPF BCR PLUS, valid as of December 31, 2021 as posted on the ASF website.
Pillar IV operates in addition to the three pension pillars in Romania: Pillar I - the state pension, Pillar II - the privately managed mandatory pension system and Pillar III - the privately managed voluntary pension system, Agerpres informs.