3 firms emerge top bidders for EPFO funds

Asset management firms ICICI Securities Primary Dealership, Reliance Capital AMC and HSBC AMC have emerged as top bidders for managing the huge corpus of retirement fund body EPFO.

The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) apex decision making body the Central Board of Trustees (CBT) will take a final call on appointing fund managers for three years term beginning April 1 in its meeting on February 19.

However, as many as six asset management companies have qualified technical as well as financial bids for managing EPFO funds. Though SBI had also submitted its bid, the CBT has already nominated it as fund manager for another term and will approve its appointment in the meeting on Thursday.

As per the agenda listed for the CBT meet, ICICI Securities Primary Dealership has been ranked as top bidder on the basis technical and financial parameters followed by Reliance Capital AMC and HSBC AMC.

The other shortlisted bidders are UTI AMC followed by ICICI Prudential and Birla Sun Life AMC.

At present, EPFO is managing a corpus of Rs 6.5 lakh crore. EPFO's funds at present are being managed by SBI, HSBC AMC, Reliance Capital AMC and ICICI Securities Primary Dealership. The term of these fund managers ends on March 31, 2015.

EPFO has a subscriber base of over 5 crore (50 million) and receives over Rs 70,000 crore (Rs 700 billion) as incremental deposits every year. During the current financial year, EPFO's incremental deposits are estimated to be Rs 79,000 crore (Rs 790 billion).

The tender for appointment of fund managers was floated on December 9. The EPFO received 8 bids including SBI. The Axis AMC did not meet the technical parameters.

As far as financial bids are concerned, ICICI Securities Primary Dealership's bid was the lowest at 0.0000000005 per cent of the funds to be managed. That means ICICI Securities PD will charge Rs 5 for managing every Rs 1,000 crore of funds.

Similarly, Reliance Capital AMC had quoted a rate of 0.00009 per cent followed by UTI AMC at 0.0025 per cent, HSBC AMC at 0.0043 per cent, ICICI Prudential at 0.0061 per cent and Birla Sun Life at 0.05 per cent.