NPS assets under management to touch ₹15 lakh crore by fiscal end: PFRDA Chairman

Association of NPS Intermediaries aims to promote NPS, enhance subscriber welfare, and expand pension coverage in India.

The assets under management (AUM) of the National Pension System are expected to touch ₹15 lakh crore by the end of the current fiscal year, Pension Fund Regulatory Development Authority Chairman Deepak Mohanty said on Saturday (December 21, 2024).

At a media interaction following the official launch of the Association of NPS Intermediaries, Mr. Mohanty also said the take up rate by the employees in the corporate sector remains a challenge.

This Association of NPS comprises stakeholders including pension fund managers, points of presence (bank and non-bank), central record-keeping agencies, trustee banks, custodians, aggregators, annuity service providers, pension agents, retirement advisors, and other industry participants.

The association aims to represent the interests of all intermediaries in the NPS ecosystem, promote NPS as a reliable, flexible, and tax-efficient retirement product, focus on subscriber welfare by ensuring smooth and transparent processes within the system and also to collaborate with regulators and policymakers to improve the NPS framework.

"The total subscribers [in the pension sector] at this moment are more than 8 crore [including 6.4 crore in Atal Pension Yojana], out of which in NPS there are about 1.6 crore subscribers and the corpus what people are contributing to the pension system is almost ₹14 lakh crore, and given that situation, our expectation is that by the end of the year, it should ₹15 lakh crore," Mr. Mohanty said.

Of the 1.6 crore NPS subscriber base, 62 lakh are from the private sector and 18 lakh from the corporate sector.

"So, that is the big challenge. We have about 18,000 corporates, including big corporates, who have joined NPS, but the take up rate by employees is less partly because there are so many things [and] partly, because of lack of awareness that we are trying to expand," he said.