Within the scope of the project named “We Meet for Your Retirement, Turkey is Getting BESed” conducted by Pension Monitoring Center and Habertürk TV, a panel was organized at Gebze Chamber of Commerce with the participation of leading representatives from the pension market. During the panel, market assessments were shared by Murat Kayacı, Assistant General Director of Insurance; Mehmet Akif Eroğlu, Secretary General of the Insurance Association of Turkey; and Nail Çiler, Chairman of Gebze Chamber of Commerce. They explained and discussed the benefits of Individual Pension System (BES) and Auto Enrollment System (OKS) as well as the opinions about individual saving and investments.

‘Our target in supporting this system is to increase the level of savings’

Murat Kayacı, Assistant General Director of Insurance, shared the evaluations about Auto-Enrollment and the changes in the system this past year from the perspective of the Undersecretariat of Treasury; said: “We see that Turkey is not the only country in the world that needs a system like this. Other countries also have systems supporting their social security systems. This system has a single purpose: to support the income we receive from the social security system during our retirement so that we can have a better life in our old ages. For our country, the importance of private pension system is the ability to increase the level of savings. Our sole purpose in supporting this system as the government and public sector is to enhance the savings in our country. That’s one of the reasons why the State is giving full support to this system.” Kayacı also shared his opinions about the Auto-Enrollment System, which has just turned 1 year old: “Participations to the system are regulated according to a pre-determined calendar. We should observe the results of the first phase very closely and see how many people choose to stay in the system and resulting figures accordingly.”

“We caught UK’s 5-year performance in only 5 months”

Mehmet Akif Eroğlu, Secretary General of the Insurance Association of Turkey, assessed the results of their research about the Auto-Enrollment System: “Auto-Enrollment is applied around the world. Similar models in other countries are slightly different than that of Turkey’s, and are mostly based on compulsory participation. However, in some countries they are based on voluntary participation like in Turkey. There are several contributions including employer’s contribution. Our system does not include employer’s contribution; but a very generous state support of 25 percent. We have commissioned a public opinion poll to find our why people have decided to leave the system since its initiation. Our researches have revealed that people are not fully aware of the system’s features. So far, withdrawal rate stands at around 53 percent. Positivity or negativity of the system depends on where your perspective. Considering that it is a voluntary system without employer’s contribution, we can say that this rate is good. 47 percent of participants deliberately chose to stay in the system. With this new system, we achieved UK’s 5-year performance in only 5 months. Another striking result of the research is the fact that ‘state subsidy fund’ is the only common information possessed by all three groups of participants: those who are in the system, who have left, and those who have not participated yet. As a simple and easily understood concept, we see that the public understands the concept of state support very well. However, period of withdrawal is one of the major misunderstood or unknown points.”