European Commissioner for Financial Services, Valdis Dombrovskis, praised on Tuesday 23 April the merits of the pan-European Personal Pension Product (PEPP), which will soon appear on the markets, at the Nordic-Baltic Conference in Riga.
The legislative proposal creating this new product category was presented in June 2017 (see EUROPE 11819/2), following the fragmentation of the European individual retirement savings market. At the beginning of April, the European Parliament definitively approved the interinstitutional agreement with the Member States (see EUROPE 12229/7), and the text should be formally adopted by the EU Council in June.
PEPP will provide a voluntary option for people to save for their pensions, alongside the occupational and state-based pensions systems available today, the Latvian Commissioner welcomed.
Some suppliers have already announced that they are about to offer a PEPP, Dombrovskis said. For him, this could triple the size of the European market for individual pension products, from the current €700 million to €2.1 billion in 2030.
But these benefits will only go hand in hand with effective implementation, the Commissioner warned. In doing so, it urged Member States to give PEPPs the same tax treatment as similar domestic individual pension products, even if they do not meet all national tax relief criteria. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)