The Ministry of Finance Professional Insurance Fund (TEA-YPOIK) announced its positive results for 2020, achieved by the management of the Fund’s Pension Benefits and Healthcare investment portfolios.
Both Fund arms (Pension Benefits and Healthcare) in 2020, in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic and the particularly adverse economic climate that resulted, managed to record positive returns-gains in their assets, to the benefit of the Fund’s subscribers.
Specifically, increases in the assets of the Fund’s two arms (Pension Benefits, Healthcare) for 2020 amounted to 1.66% for Pension Benefits and 10.02% for the Healthcare arm. These results were achieved due to the periodic contribution payments distributed over the year, resulting in a lower average acquisition of the investment mutual fund shares. The time-weighted return on the Pension Benefit investment portfolio was 0.26%, and for the Healthcare arm, 9.84%.
The new Pension Benefit arm of the TEA-YPOIK in January 2021 marked two years of operation. During this period, 763 members were registered in it, and its assets at 31/12/2020 totalled €630,040. Additionally, during the two-year period 2019-2020, the TEA-YPOIK Pension Benefit arm recorded a positive cumulative increase in its assets of 1.81%, providing significant gains for the individual accounts of its insured members in which their personal contributions are deposited.
The investments of contributions to the TEA-YPOIK Pension Benefits arm are managed by the Investment Commission and the Fund’s Investment Manager using the most appropriate investment instrument for developing the assets, which are the Undertakings for Collective Investment (UCITS), commonly known as mutual funds. The mutual funds are the most strictly supervised, transparent, accessible and internationally successful instrument for effectively investing subscriber savings.
With the main aim of protecting capital and achieving long-term returns from income, the TEA-YPOIK investment profile is a defensive/balanced type, meaning it does not aim at assuming a high investment risk.
Specifically, the investment goal of the mutual fund, in which the Fund’s Pension Benefits contributions are deposited, is to increase the value of its investments from both income and from investment gains by investing the assets mainly in debt securities in euro. To realize this goal, the mutual fund invests its net assets mainly in an appropriately diversified portfolio of government, supranational and corporate bonds, regardless of credit rating. Further, the mutual fund’s assets are mainly invested in short- and medium-term bonds and secondarily in other transferable securities, money market instruments, bank deposits and shares or stock in UCITS.
Finally, the TEA-YPOIK Board of Directors, at its meeting of March 2021, approved the Fund Investment Committee’s recommendation to establish a like-named mutual fund within the first half of 2021. This action is good practice in investment management of professional fund assets.
