Know about fund options and pension fund managers before investing in NPS

The National Pension System (NPS) is a defined contribution retirement savings scheme, managed by the PFRDA and comes with several features and quite a handful of options.

While filling the application form whether online or offline, one needs to select the fund options, the pension fund (PF) manager, the investment strategy and even the annuity provider. If, however, the subscriber doesn’t select any of the options under each such category, there is a default option provided by the PFRDA for each of them.

1. Selection of Pension Fund Manager

The selection of the PF manager is important as it will decide which entity is going to manage your NPS funds. You may select different PF managers for your NPS Tier I and Tier II accounts. The PF managers are - LIC Pension Fund, SBI Pension Funds, UTI Retirement Solutions, HDFC Pension Management, ICICI Prudential Pension Fund Management, Kotak Mahindra Pension Fund, Reliance Capital Pension Fund, and Birla Sun Life Pension Management.

Subscribers of All Citizen Model and Corporate Model may choose one of the PF managers from the list above. However, for the government subscribers, these three act as default PFs (a) LIC Pension Fund Limited (b) SBI Pension Funds Pvt. Limited (c) UTI Retirement Solutions Ltd.