Savings pot withdrawal claims flood pension administrators

After the two-pot retirement system was implemented last Sunday, thousands of pension fund members have submitted withdrawal claims, but many who inquired decided not to claim after calculations showed they will get very little out in the end.

- InaOpperman

Anneke Hanekom, head of reputation management and group CEO projects at Momentum, says many inquiring applicants decided against applying after they used the online calculators and asked their advisors and saw the large tax amount they would have had to pay.

Momentum received a total number of approximately 35 429 applications by Thursday, representing about 5% of its contracts.

The cumulative amounts of withdrawals applied for amounted to R8.6 million, excluding Metropolitan and Momentum Corporate.

"The large volumes of withdrawal requests placed a strain on our employees, but we put in extra hours and personnel to process requests, while our AI bots relieved much of the load.

"We prepared well in advance of 1 September in anticipation of a higher than usual volume we would receive and we managed well."

John Anderson, executive for solutions and enablement at Alexforbes, says the company went live with the two-pot retirement system on 3 September and immediately began processing withdrawal applications.