Alexander Forbes loses lucrative BPOPF deal
Brian Benza | Wednesday September 23, 2015 18:00
The services, which include collection of members’ contributions and administration of benefits, are currently outsourced to Alexander Forbes Financials Services.
Speaking to Mmegi Business on the sidelines of the launch of the fund’s whistle blowing facility in Gaborone yesterday, BPOPF’s new CEO, Boitumelo Molefe said the decision to insource administration of members’ files and pensioners’ benefits was based on the realisation that the fund, as a secretariat, should be handling its members’ accounts.
Molefe said: “The fund was doing more of governance and playing a limited role of the direct management of secretariat accounts. The board of trustees has decided that we are now going to be administering members’ benefits, trust services, pensioners’ payroll and management of records in-house. This means we will no longer have any services that are outsourced apart from investments management and annuities provision. We were paying a fair amount in outsourcing these services and with insourcing we are going to save 70 percent of the costs.”
The BPOPF has already rolled out a new IT system to manage data for the members, which Molefe says is more efficient as it has data cleaning and protection components.
As part of the new changes, the BPOPF has already retrieved the members’ records from Alexander Forbes.
“From April this year we started bringing in the members records and we currently now have all the files in our new system,” she said. “From the 22nd of October, we are going to start a six months parallel run with Alexander Forbes and from April next year, we will go live independently.”
Molefe, however, declined to disclose how much they were paying Alexander Forbes for the services citing client confidentiality. Efforts to get a comment from Alexander Forbes managing director, Paul Masie were also not fruitful by press time.
Officially launching the whistle blowing facility, Chairman of BPOPF’s Risk and Audit Committee, Ikwatlhaeng Bagopi said through in-sourcing of the services, the fund would save millions of Pula that will now be directed towards boosting of members’ benefits.
“The launch of the whistle blowing facility is critical as it would help the transition we are going through in bringing the administration of members accounts in-house,” he said.
Administration of whistle blowing, which is aimed at curbing fraud and corruption at Botswana’s largest pension fund, has been outsourced to accounting firm, Deloitte.
The BPOPF, which holds 65 percent of its P51 billion war chest offshore, recently shook up the local capital markets by withdrawing mandates from some local managers and allocating them to new clients. Last year, the fund also launched a P800 million local private equity fund, P500 million of which was awarded to Capital Management Botswana with the remainder still out on tender.