The announcement by the €552m VKG-CPM Belgian pension fund for doctors, dentists and pharmacists that it had established a new healthcare sector pension fund, ‘Amonis’, with potential membership of 250,000 employees across the country, was not only one of the most significant in the Belgian pension market in recent times, but a clear indication of a European trend that is aligning pension funding initiatives with the socially oriented policy of some of the continent’s left-leaning governments.
VKG’s concept clearly falls in line with the Belgian government’s desire to create sector funds for as many different professions as possible under the forthcoming Vandenbroucke law.
While the ink is not yet dry on the legislation, the boost to the government’s plans with the creation of Amonis could not be clearer.
Such endeavours are redrawing the pensions map in Europe - imposing new architecture onto old plans.
Amonis incorporates a Sicav investment fund structure - significantly the first non-banking entity of its kind in Belgium - that is open to both institutional and private investors within the healthcare sector.
The structure leverages off VKG’s experience in asset management and pensions services and consists of nine diversified investment compartments with VKG overseeing the management, administration and actuarial services. The investment itself is outsourced to seven external managers.
Flexibility, transparency and solidarity are the key principles expounded.
Daniel Désir, a member of the VKG/CPM board, outlines the benefits of Amonis as a pensions group: “We are a not for profit organisation, so there are no shareholders to pay. “One of the results of this is solidarity. “New members are immediately covered fully from the start of their contributions.”
Belgian healthcare professions can either set up their own pension fund and join the Amonis structure or invest through the Sicav.
Désir adds: “Our aim is to have distinct structures but synergies. “We want to respect all these different sensibilities in a platform that is quite heterogeneous.”
He notes that in order for the fund to guarantee expertise and independence, Amonis will have a board comprised of top industry, social and government experts that will be asking “all the right questions” of the organisations activities.
Already the VIKIN pension scheme for some 24,000 Kinesiologists in Belgium has seen the benefits in climbing on board.
A separate life insurance entity within the group ‘Amonis Life’, which has yet to be fully approved, will also piggy back on existing VKG provision, albeit with a new software system for administration.
The firm says its initial target for insurance products will be the 100,000 plus member Belgian hospital sector, but notes that lot of ‘input’ is still needed to decide on the individual products that can be offered within the life insurance arm.
The possibility of marketing the Amonis plan to other sectors in Belgium is certainly being touted as an option.
But looking at the bigger picture, a tie up on a European scale is a very real possibility
“We are talking to other pension funds around Europe with the same approach in a similar vein in countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, and Northern and Southern Europe, where we might be able to envisage a fusion,” says Désir.
Karel Stroobants, general manager of the VKG fund points out that countries such as Denmark also have union organised pension models within industry sectors.
Asked whether the creation of Amonis could be the first step in the creation of pan-European sector funds, he comments: “In those countries where we have good contacts we have already exchanged views on such a possibility, so discussion has been initiated.
“Evidently in different countries there are different issues to look at.
“On the European front though Frits Bolkestein is pushing hard to abolish the fiscal burdens that could prevent this and in Belgium if we see a draft law moving in the right direction and fiscal harmonisation in Europe, then why not?”
In Germany, collective bargaining contracts between industry-wide associations and their respective trade unions - seen most recently in metal and chemical sectors - are signalling a burgeoning trend in the country’s pension fund industry.
Italy has ploughed a similar furrow in the creation of closed-end industry funds - albeit with some criticism over conservative investment policies.
If the structures and the management are safe and efficient and invested to the highest industry standards, who’s to say that the European pensions future is not collective?

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