The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration chose five managers to take charge of the fifteen public promotion savings vehicles on the eve of the general elections on July 23. Since then, the VidaCaixa, BBVA, Caser, Ibercaja and Santander teams have met periodically with those responsible for José Luis Escrivá’s office to finalize the common platform that compiles information on their offers and finalize the details of their promotion. The sources consulted by La Información state that it is the Social Security portfolio that sets the times and will determine the moment of departure, so for now each of the firms is preparing its strategy to gather 500 million in savings in three years.
This is the goal set in the Ministry’s bidding document, which amounts to a total of 2,500 million by 2027, which has led each of the managers to design an ambitious plan to either acquire a significant number of workers who Make periodic contributions or bet on the sectors and positions with higher salaries to approach this goal at an accelerated pace. Because? It will be companies, colleges or professional associations that decide to offer their employees or members this savings route to have a supplement to the public pension in the future. And the companies’ contributions to the employment plan will be conditional on the worker’s salary and their contributions will only be able to be multiplied by 2.5, as explained by Caser.
It is common for the option to offer an employment pension plan to arise within the conversations at the collective bargaining table, which is why the manager points out that it is common to hold meetings with the company’s representation or even with the of employees to explain the details of their products. A catalog in which in a matter of months the three fixed, variable and mixed income vehicles will also enter. For this reason, Caser sources point out that far from having a passive attitude, they will focus on the sectors and especially on the professions with better salaries to meet the goal of 500 million, which a priori they believe is difficult to achieve by the poor financial culture of citizens.
At Ibercaja, however, they are more optimistic. “Our estimates make us predict that we will meet that minimum threshold of 500 million. We are developing a commercial plan to be able to comply with it and make it reach our present and potential clients, we believe that the path is very broad and we are committed to their desire,” says the director of Ibercaja Pensión, José Carlos Vizárraga, to this newspaper. They also advance that they will also target the sectors that are doing best in this economic cycle, given that they understand that they will be the most interested in launching sectoral pension plans.
Another of the managers consulted, who prefers not to be identified, has detected two target niches: public organizations and sectoral agreements. However, they do not give as much importance to the salary range of workers in these sectors (and the contributions that each of them can make), but to the number of new savers who can reach through these three new vehicles. The entity affirms that it moves within a range that oscillates between 500,000 and 1.5 million workers to reach the objective of 500 million savings in three years. On the other hand, another of the winning managers maintains that, since they cannot choose which sectors will or will not promote employment pension plans, they will limit themselves to remaining available to the actors involved in this negotiation.
Savings plan for the self-employed
Escrivá’s department has designed employment plans to provide coverage to companies, SMEs, workers and the self-employed who could not promote an employment plan on their own because their savings capacity was reduced. With this objective, the ‘regulation law for the promotion of employment pension plans’ was approved in 2022, and on the eve of the general elections, the regulation that outlined its development was approved by the Council of Ministers, meeting the established deadlines. Public promotion vehicles find support in this regulatory development but have the peculiarity that the control commission will be made up of representatives of the ministry, employers and unions.
Precisely, the managers consulted point out that the self-employed are the only ones who could transfer their individual pension plans to those of a collective and public promotion type. “In each case we will have to advise them whether or not it is convenient for them to transfer the rights they have in the individual system since it has different fiscal and rescue connotations between systems,” says the director of Ibercaja Pensión. In recent years, the Government has favored employment plans, raising the exempt contribution limit to 8,500 euros, while reducing the maximum for contributions to individual pension plans to 1,500, which in 2020 amounted to 8,000 euros.