The 3rd report of the evaluation and monitoring committee of the France Strategy Pact law confirms the success of the Retirement Savings Plans, which succeeded three years ago to the PERP, Madelin, Perco and other articles 83.
This overhaul of the pension supplement media, which has set up a more readable and flexible system than its predecessors, has achieved the quantified objectives defined in September 2019 by the Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire: to achieve an outstanding amount of 300 billion euros for retirement savings (all media combined, compared to 230 billion in 2018) and 3 million holders of a PER at the end of 2022.
66.4 billion euros placed on PER at the end of the 1st quarter
The objectives will even be largely exceeded since the total outstanding retirement savings already amounted to 279.4 billion euros at the end of the first quarter – including 66.4 billion euros invested in PERs, i.e. 24% – and that the number of holders of these new plans on this same date was 5.6 million.
For the most part, these results were mainly obtained by transfers from old plans (such as PERCOs for example) and, in part, from life insurance contracts, to the new vehicles, encouraged by temporary tax advantages.
At the end of March 2022, 79% of the outstandings on the new products created by the Pacte law came from transfers of old products and the holders of these old products transferred to new PERs represented more than two-thirds of the holders of PERs.
The share of transfers, still the majority, tends to decrease
On the individual PER side (contracted directly by households and not by their company within the framework of profit-sharing), the share of new contracts resulting from transfers of old products has however decreased between March 2021 and March 2022 (74% in 2022 compared to 83% in 2021).
And between March 31, 2021 and March 31, 2022, the number of holders of new PERs, all types combined, increased by more than two thirds, a logical phenomenon as more and more existing supports are now being transferred.
Once they have been put into orbit successfully, these supports will now have to move on to the second phase of their development, which will be more difficult: that based on new savers. To this end, the distributors will have to make some efforts while the Minister of the Economy had denounced at the beginning of the year the lack of transparency and the “excessive” fees charged by insurers on PERs.
Greater transparency on costs
To show their credentials with Bercy, insurers have undertaken since this summer to publish a harmonized table of the costs of these supports on their websites. Legislation has backed up these commitments: since July 1, the total unit-linked costs during the last closed financial year (constituting the sum of the management fees deducted from the unit-linked account and the recurring costs deducted from the contract), expressed as a percentage, must in the pre-contractual information of life insurance, capitalization and PER contracts.
From January 1, 2023, the mention of these total costs will also be mandatory for each unit of account in the documents of the annual information campaign.