Which insurance company beat Colpensiones to the punch in the Accai licensing process?

Although Law 2381 or the pension reform will not come into effect until July 1, the race to capture the largest share of the pension savings market of millions of Colombians who earn more than 2.3 legal minimum monthly wages or 3.27 million pesos has already begun with four entities in the lead, the AFPs Porvenir, Protección, Colfondos and Skandia, which have already been licensed to operate as Administrators of the Complementary Component of Individual Savings (Accai) since January 8.

They will not be the only ones. As we recall, the pension reform enabled at least more than 70 entities to reach this market segment, including trust companies, stockbrokers, life insurance companies, Colpensiones and non-profit entities authorized and supervised by the Financial Superintendence.

According to what EL TIEMPO was able to establish, in the midst of surveillance and control, requests continue to arrive from some entities requesting the respective license to operate as Accai.

The most advanced is that of the state-owned Compañía de Seguros Positiva, whose directors hope that this week the Superintendency of Finance will give them the green light in this regard, thereby taking advantage of Colpensiones, another state entity interested in obtaining the same license, according to Jaime Dussán, its president, who in a recent interview with this publishing house, indicated that they had already initiated the same process before the authority.

However, as it was established, the procedure managed by Colpensiones is not that of the license as such, but rather the request for information on the requirements necessary to obtain said license from Accai.

"It is one thing to request information to obtain the Accai license and quite another to actually apply for the license," said César Ferrari, Financial Superintendent, when asked about the process being carried out by Colpensiones in this regard.

With the arrival of Positiva Seguros to the new segment of Accai, entities that will be in charge of managing all pension savings of those Colombians who earn more than 2.3 minimum wages once the pension reform comes into effect, there will now be five entities authorized for this purpose.

" We hope to have the authorization by the end of this week, and finish adjusting details between now and July 1st. In terms of human talent and financial capacity, we are confident to operate from that date," Andrés Felipe Uribe Mesa, Vice President of Business for the insurance company, told EL TIEMPO.

The executive said that the company analyzed that this is a good business opportunity. "We believe that a balance of competition between the public and private sectors is important, and we want to be the ones who support Colombian workers in generating the necessary resources for their pensions. We want to be the Accai of Colombians," he said.

Uribe Mesa highlighted Positiva's experience in pension administration, since through the pension commutation branch they pay pensions for the Bogotá Telephone Company (ETB), among others, while doing the same with pensions derived from the ARL occupational risk policies of said insurers.

He warns that they are not afraid of competition, even though there are players who have been in the pension market for 30 years, and that in the new system they were given some advantages over new players. "We hope to be able to compete under rules of the game that will be new for everyone and to seek a large percentage of the market. Between now and 2030 we hope to be managing more than 3 billion pesos of Colombians' savings, with the guarantee of protection of resources," said the director .

Under the new rules, the deadline for people with basic pension contribution incomes above 2.3 legal monthly minimum wages to choose an Accai expired on January 16. Thus, of the 447,512 workers linked to Colpensiones who met this requirement, 212,428 voluntarily chose one of the four Accais. Those who did not make this choice will be randomly reassigned one by the Government, through the Administrative Unit for Pension Management and Parafiscal Contributions (Ugpp) in the coming days (March), as established by the rule.

The competition for these resources has only just begun, however, and several entities, including insurance companies, are already beginning to look toward the opportunity offered by the pension reform.

Faced with this alternative, Gustavo Morales Cobo, president of the Colombian Federation of Insurers (Fasecolda), said: "Another success of the pension reform is to have opened the possibility for new actors, duly regulated and with experience, to come in to safeguard and grow the pension savings of Colombians.

The director added that this increased competition will be very positive, while he said that life insurance companies have expressed their interest and are waiting to see what will happen to Law 2381 of 20924 in the Constitutional Court. "In almost the entire world, insurance companies are the main custodians of people's savings and the main institutional investors," he said.