John Obaro, managing director, SystemSpecs at a Workshop on Remita Pension for Pension Fund Administrators and Pension Fund Custodians in Lagos spoke on Remita Pension, a world class electronic courier service that rides on e-Payment platforms to deliver funds to bank accounts and associated schedules to relevant bodies in pre-specified formats. Excerpts:
About the Workshop
Essentially, it is a forum to create awareness on the Pension Industry Solution, a solution that can assist employers to fulfill their regulatory obligations of remitting contributory pensions on monthly basis to their respective PFAs. So we are meeting with key players in the industry- the PFCs and the PFAs to show them the capabilities of the solution. The solution assists employers to upload their schedules and effect e-payment such that their diverse PFAs are able to receive electronic schedules on real time basis.
PFAs & PFCs Blaming Regulators for not making Money
I do not think it is an issue of blaming regulators as such. The process in place for employers to fulfill their regulatory obligations has hitherto been cumbersome and when it is difficult to fulfill a law, even when the will is there, you may still have operational challenges and that is the kind of thing going on in the pension industry. It is a cumbersome process for a typical employer to deal with 5-10 PFAs. Employees leave the organization, so every month they need to re-compute how much pension should be paid on each employee, what should go to each PFA, that can easily become a nightmare so you find many organizations now having to set up desks or units to follow up because of the operational challenge. That is part of issues leading to PFAs not getting as many contributors as they would love on their platforms. That is one of the reasons we came up with a solution like this to make life easier for the employer who can upload all his schedules at once. There is no reason to break them to any structure, it goes to different PFAs, irrespective of the PFCs managing them and the PFAs and PFCs are able to see only the things that relate to them.
Reconciling Schedules
These are some of the symptoms of the current operational process. It is a fall out because the system itself wouldn’t work so you would always have things that create a kind of problem and that is where Remita comes in. It is no more simple for you to send a schedule that does not balance with the payment you want to make because it is the system after it accepts the schedules from the employer that re-computes the total contributory pension to be paid by that organization. The organization is debited for this sum and the various PFAs are credited in their accounts with the various PFCs. Immediately the payment is confirmed as successful, the PFAs and the PFCs immediately see schedules of those who have paid.
Relationship with Banks
Remita is an e-payment solution and what we have done is only to extend the features of the e-payment and translate it to business to make life operationally easier for organizations. As an e-payment solution, what it means is that we have relationship with the banks so for any employer using the platform, he would have filled an application form with the bank. It is actually the bank that will enable the organization on the Remita platform such that when transactions come from the Remita platform, the banks are able to recognize and respect that instruction. So the bank effects the debit and we move it on to the other banks and the bank then credits the beneficiary.
History of Remita Pension Solution
It was developed in 2005, the early days of the pension reform. That was when we started working on this solution and we’ve always had our eyes on the pension industry. The solution is about five years old, that is Remita but this is the first time when we have are focusing and bringing out the operational convenience for employers and PFAs. Remita is basically a payment engine. As a payment engine, we focus more on getting payments right, building relationships with all the banks so that they can respect instructions coming in from bank platforms and then of course our core area which has always been human manager payroll had moved our clients unto the platform, then we went into vendors and contractor payments and now we are focusing on the pension industry. Several organizations have been using it for pension payments. What we are discussing with the PFAs and PFCs is that we are now focusing on the pension aspect of Remita because the issue of funds not matching schedules has become a major crisis in the industry and since this is one of the core areas of strength of Remita, of course it is time for us to push it.
