The Dutch Pensions Federation has objected to European supervisor EIOPA directly approaching individual pension funds to collect statistical data.
In a response to EIOPA’s consultation on the pension fund data collection proposals, the trade body said that, in order to save costs, the data should be supplied through local supervisor De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB).
Last summer, the European watchdog launched its consultation aimed at enhancing transparency and comparability of pension funds, as well as stabilising the financial system.
The sector organisation called upon EIOPA, the European Central Bank and DNB to align all required reporting as much as possible, in order to keep the administrative burden – which would come at the expense of pension funds’ participants – as low as possible.
It suggested that DNB could extract the required data for the European regulator from local reports.
To enable this, EU member states should be given more flexibility on data collection and distribution, with a key role for local supervisors because of the amount of information that is already locally available, the federation argued.
It suggested the introduction of a one-stop shop with reporting requirements tailored as closely as possible to the current reporting rules.
The federation said it preferred a basic data request “as to determine the level of detail”, and that every data item should be requested only once.
In the trade body’s opinion, data should be aggregated and validated at country level, and based on the local balance sheet.
The federation said it had co-ordinated its response with several pension funds and service providers and that it worked closely with DNB.
German and British pension fund trade bodies have also criticised EIOPA’s plans, as has PensionsEurope, the EU-wide trade body for pension schemes. The latter has called into question EIOPA’s legal basis for requesting the data.
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