State-owned lender State Bank of India has given a return of 9.7 per cent on provident fund deposits, which is over half a percentage more than the best among the private sector asset managers during the quarter ended December 2008.
The other three private fund managers, including HSBC Asset Management Company (AMC), ICICI Prudential AMC and Reliance AMC, gave a yield of 8.5, 9 and 9.1 per cent, respectively, from September 17 to December 31 in 2008, a source in the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) said.
EPFO is managing a corpus of around Rs 1.82 crore with incremental deposits of around Rs 25,000 crore every year. It covers over 500,000 employers.
The organisation, which manages about 44 million provident fund depositors, allowed the three private fund managers to manage its incremental deposits of about Rs 25,000 crore per annum in July last year. The main objective of this exercise was to see an improvement in returns on EPFO’s investments.
EPFO’s returns on investments, especially in the central and state government securities and special deposit schemes, are not enough to pay the depositors an interest rate of over 9 per cent. EPFO has invested Rs 30,461 crore in central government securities, which earns a return of 7.25 per cent, and Rs 20,000 crore in state government securities and loans, which fetches a return of 7.5 per cent.
