Asset under management may cross magical number of Rs 10 lakh crore by September: PFRDA Chairman

The AUM under pension schemes is expected to cross the landmark figure of Rs 10 lakh crore in the first half of this fiscal, helped by regular contributions from subscribers, PFRDA Chairman Deepak Mohanty has said. As per the latest figure, assets under management (AUM) — including National Pension Scheme (NPS), Atal Pension Yojana (APY) and NPS Lite — increased to Rs 9.58 lakh crore.

“We have reached an AUM size of about Rs 9.5 lakh crore. So, one will not be surprised that by the middle of this financial year, we could cross the magical figure of 10 lakh crore of NPS corpus,” he told in an interview.

It depends on so many other things like the return that the fund generates and the performance of the market, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) chairman said.

The AUM corpus is mark-to-market, so the adverse moment in the market impacts the corpus.

Out of Rs 9.58 lakh crore, he said, NPS alone has a fund size of Rs 9.29 lakh crore while the remaining Rs 28,538 crore is the corpus of APY.

In terms of numbers, Mohanty said subscribers under NPS have already crossed 10 lakh last year. This year, he said, “We expect the number of subscribers to touch 13 lakh as this space is growing. We hope to achieve this number”. NPS comprises contributions from government employees and the other part is the private sector, he said, adding the government sector is on autopilot because they keep coming on their own, but there is a need to grow on the private side.

For this, Mohanty said, the regulator is taking a lot of initiatives, for example, PFRDA has allowed even the agents to underwrite NPS and trade bodies are being sensitised to promote NPS among corporates.

“On the digital side, we have taken a lot of initiatives for example, e-NPS, where one can do it on their own rather than through an intermediary,” he said.

With regard to APY, the regulator said penetration and expansion have been quite satisfactory.

“Last year, we crossed a landmark of more than one crore subscribers — to be exact 1.2 crore. And this year (2023-24), we are targeting about 1.3 crore,” he said.

So, as of now, the APY subscription base is almost 5.2 crore, which is quite substantial, Mohanty added.

“But having said that potential is there. If you look at the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), which has 49 crore accounts. Of this, about 25 crore account holders are in the age group of 18 to 40. That is the potential segment that we need to tap and thus a long way to go…we are to see how we manage the whole process in a more systematic and manageable way,” he noted.