The Pacte law is celebrating its third anniversary. Thanks to this law, you have the possibility of combining your retirement savings into a single savings product, the PER. What is the weight of transfers in the more than 4 million retirement savings plans touted by Bercy? What you need to know, in 5 figures.
Since October 2019, savers have been able to easily collect and transfer their retirement savings thanks to the Pacte law. From January 2020, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, father of this reform of the Retirement Savings Plan (PER), boasted of the greatest success we have obtained in terms of creating financial products. A statistical success, indeed, with now more than 4 million plans. For a family of investments which has a non-negligible place in the portfolio of the French: according to INSEE, 15% of French households have at least one retirement savings product, whether it is an older generation product or a new PER. Have the French been seduced to the point of transforming their old plans into new PERs? Or even bring everything together in one and the same distributor to make life easier?
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1. More than 4million PER holders…
Bercy had more than 4.3 million PER holders at the end of September 2021, according to the latest figures released in February 2022. But the family of the Retirement Savings Plan is twofold: on the one hand the individual PER, on the other the collective PER.
Most often, open individual plans (PERin) – created to replace the PERP and the Madelin (the latter intended for non-salaried workers) – are PER insurance, managed by insurers. Individual PERs account for approximately 60% of the market. France Assureurs recently announced 2.6 million PER insurance holders at the end of 2021, of which 73% are individual PERs. Better: during the first quarter of 2022, France Assureurs counted 442,000 additional policyholders for a total outstanding amount at the end of March of 37.8 billion euros. The threshold of 3 million policyholders holding a PER [assurance] was exceeded at the end of March, says France Assureurs.
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Collective PERs have replaced Perco (collective retirement savings plan subscribed by the company, intended for voluntary employees) but also Article 83-type contracts (intended for employees but whose membership is compulsory). The latter, most often PER securities accounts managed by asset managers, are employee savings products, and therefore collective PERs. According to the French financial management association (AFG), 1.75 million savers benefited from it at the end of 2021.
2. Individual PER: 44% transfers from old Perp or Madelin
Of the 2.6 million PER insurance recorded by France Assureurs at the end of December, 1.2 million came from a transfer. Or at least come from a transformation of an old retirement savings contract, Perp or Madelin, by changing insurers or staying with the same company. A year earlier, at the end of December 2020, the same federation had 688,000 transformations: the pace is constant but we cannot speak of an acceleration in 2021 on this point.
The potential of products remaining to be transformed is still very high. If the figures for 2021 have not yet been communicated by the association, in 2020 there were nearly 1.2 million Madelin and 2.3 million Perp.
On the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of the Pacte law, MoneyVox sent a questionnaire to around forty retirement savings players. A handful of them communicated the share of transformations of Perp and Madelin into individual PERs.
- The postal bank, whose PER is distributed by CNP Assurance, accounted for 42,558 PER at March 31. Of the 3,376 contracts opened since the start of 2022, only 694 come from transformations of old Madelin and Perp contracts, i.e. barely 20.5%.
- At the house of Bee Insuranceformerly Aviva France, only 16% of the 93,104 open PERs come from contracts that are no longer marketed.
- Axa follows the same trend since of its 82,500 contracts, 15% come from other retirement savings products.
- As for the group Allianz, he seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Of the 313,000 retirement savings products marketed, 84% are processed.
In terms of company retirement savings, the AFG had 45,700 companies at the end of last year (after 66,100 companies in 2020) concerned by the creation of new PERs and the transformations of old Percos. The AFG does not communicate the share of collective PERs resulting from the transformation of old Percos. Given the parallel decrease in the number of Percos, a majority of the 1.75million collective PERs probably come from a Perco: as a reminder, in this case it is the employer who decides to transform the Perco into a PER collective.
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3. Real transfers: less than one PER in 10
There are therefore still many contracts that could be transformed to offer better profitability and above all the possibility of collecting all your savings with a single insurer. A beautiful promise of the Pacte law but in reality, what is it? According to the various actors that Moneyvox was able to interview, the real transfersby switching to a competing manager, represent only a low share retirement savings, particularly among historical players.
- At the house of Amundi, out of more than 1,200 transfer requests in 2021 and during the first quarter of 2022, 0.6% of them were for transfers to competitors. On the other hand, out of 45,500 PER held, 3% comes from article 83 type contracts, PERP, mandatory PER, COREM, PREFON and CRH from other brokers.
- Allianz as for him, he does not communicate on his outgoing transfers. However, the group says it has recorded 4,318 transfers from other players, to an individual PER, or 1.4% of its stock of contracts.
- bee insurance details his incoming and outgoing transfers. Thus the former Aviva France counted at the end of March, 30,556 transfers from competition (33%) and 5,630 to other insurers (6%).
4. A 1% fee cap
In addition to the possibility of collecting your retirement savings, the Pacte law has made it possible to regulate the costs that could be invoiced to you during these famous transfers. First important information, if your contract is over 5 years old, you will not pay any fees. Beyond this lifetime, some insurers (fortunately very few) may charge you fees, up to a limit of 1% of accumulated savings.
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5. Fintechs, banks and web brokers: more than 1% of the market?
Thanks to transfer facilities and the increased supply of PERs on the market, one would have thought that web brokers could have benefited from the advantages of the Pacte law to recover savings from traditional banks or historical brokers. Even if the offer is more present with fintechs and other web brokers, online contracts are not so numerous. Among the players we surveyed, few exceed 2,000 open contracts.
Thereby, Direct-placement now has 1,800 PER, of which 300 come from other contracts from competitors. Same thing for TousLesPlacements.com which only has 207 retirement savings products with 144 new openings. Yomoni and its PER Yomoni Retraite contract stands out with 4,000 PER opened, of which only 5% from PERP and Madelin from other insurers.
What about the leaders in online savings? Among the online banks, the usual heavyweights of this market, only Boursorama launched a PER, called Matla, and the brand has not yet provided statistics on its retirement savings. Awaiting official communication from online distributors, according to our information, the reduced cost PER market on the internet weighs in at a few tens of thousands of plans. That’s not much more than 1% of retirement savers…
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