Companies will be interested in offering voluntary pensions to their employees as part of salary packages as late as next year, as their budgets are not ready to include such products yet.
The market of voluntary pensions will not be able to exploit its full potential this year, due to the lack of interest on the part of companies for these products. With the voluntary pensions programme starting as late as May this year, the companies did not have their budgets ready, so they could offer these products as benefits to their employees.
"Since companies did not know about these voluntary pensions in advance, they did not budget the necessary sums to offer their employees such benefits. Talks we are having with several companies point to the fact that the great majority will be able to buy these products as late as next year," says Radu Vasilescu, pensions manager at ING Asigurari de Viata (ING Life Insurance).
Although the option whether to buy such a financial product or not is an individual one, the legislation allows employers to offer voluntary pensions to their employees, therefore contributing to the pensions instead of their employees. This year however, the bulk of the voluntary pension sales will not be made on the corporate segment, but through retail, i.e. directly to individual clients, Vasilescu adds.
"Our first voluntary pension sales have been satisfactory, we have almost 4,000 contracts signed. There aren't that many companies, except for a few small and medium-sized ones, which have bought these products. Few companies had the necessary money in their budget to contribute to these pensions instead of their employees," says Crinu Andanut, general manager of Allianz Tiriac Pensii Private (Allianz Tiriac Private Pensions).
The voluntary pensions managers have relied a great deal on corporate sales since the programme star
