BPOPF�s insourcing suffers teething glitches
Brian Benza | Tuesday December 13, 2016 15:31
From April this year, the BPOPF re-claimed the administration of pensions for its 153,000 members from Alexander Forbes saying the move was going to see the Fund saving upto 70% of the insourcing costs.
But by CEO, Boitumelo Molefe’s own admission, despite having run a six-month parallel with Alexander Forbes prior to ‘going live’, a combination of factors has worked against insourcing of the administration including inconsistent data and tax compliance issues with members. “Our turnaround times are not yet where we want them to be. It’s a new system which my team is trying to adapt to but unfortunately we have experienced delays resulting in complaints and queries from our members,” she said.
Since taking over administering members’ benefits, trust services, pensioners’ payroll and management of records in April this year, the BPOPF no longer has any services that are outsourced apart from investments management and annuities provision.
According to Molefe, the greatest challenges has come from cleaning up the data that was handed over by Alexander Forbes resulting in delays in payments at the Fund’s 54 payments centres across the country. “Some of the data we inherited from our previous service providers was not in the best form and shape and it therefore needs a lot of cleaning up. We also have tax compliance hitches with our members. When we pay out lump sum payments our members need to have submitted their tax returns and other taxation compliance matters with BURS, but you find out that this is not often the case resulting in delays. Our staff are also on a learning curve and hopefully we should stabilise by the middle of next year,” she said. Meanwhile, the BPOPF will next year launch a new corporate identity to align with those organisations that are known to ‘deliver superior services’. The launch of the new identity comes as part of the Fund’s new 2017-2022 strategy, which was approved by the board last month.
Under the new five-year strategy to kick in next year, Molefe says the focus will be on how to better serve the members, develop staff through strategic efforts and benchmarking with other organisations in Botswana and the region. The Fund will also look to alternative asset classes to sustain growth as the traditional stock and bonds markets slow on sluggish domestic and global economic growth. According to Molefe, the fund, which has 58% of its portfolio invested offshore, will seek growth opportunities from the alternative markets as the local stock market is attracting negative returns while the global investment market has been affected by slowing economic growth, no inflationary pressures and low interest rates.