By Chinwendu Obienyi
Access Pensions has introduced a desk dedicated to encouraging their customers utilise 25 per cent of their Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) for equity contribution towards residential mortgages.
The PFA which unveiled to its customers noted that with the array of financial services in its Access Corporation ecosystem, customers can seamlessly acquire their dream home, plan retirements, preserve wealth, insurance, and other services.
Speaking on the sideline at ‘An Evening with Access Pensions’ an interactive session with some of its high net-worth individual clients in Lagos at the weekend, Executive Director, Technical Mr. Afolabi Folayan, said: “Mortgage is a way in which you can actually make your pension work for you, and a lot of people spend a lot of their money on mortgages and school fees. At Access Pensions, we believe that if you own and live in your house upon retirement, the expense you pay out after retirement will be much less. So, we believe this opportunity is a great one and people should tap into it.”
“We have made it easy by having a desk dedicated to this product to solve their problems and make the process seamless. The desk links both the property and mortgage parts in a seamless way.”
Also speaking, the Regional Head of Corporate Team, Access Pensions, Uchenna Edeh said: “We operate within an ecosystem, which is the Access corporation which has a bank and, you know, from our bank, we have been licensed also by PENCOM to give out these mortgage loans. So, what it means is that if you’re a client of Access Pensions, Access Bank is able to sit with you and also negotiate and give you a competitive rate that you probably may not be able to get out there in the market. So that is what you stand to gain with us.”
For her part, Head Private Clients Access Pensions, Yetunde Olumuyiwa, noted that Access Pensions in promoting this product understood that it would deplete the funds under management but Access Pensions is more concerned on products that are of great value to its clients.
She said: “ One of the critical things that people should understand about the mortgage product is that it typically means that the clients would draw out from their retirement savings account, and that’s not what a lot of PFA’s want to talk about or want to see happen because it depletes your pool, but what Access Pensions tries to do is to look at the big picture because we know if we help our clients from start to finish to own a house their lives would be better off upon retirement.”
She further added: “Right now we are number four in terms of asset under management (AUM) and in terms of the number of clients, we are number two, but in the next few years, the target is to be number one. So definitely, you will be seeing a lot of more engagements from Access Pensions especially for those that are already our clients and those that would be our clients moving forward.”