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MPF: one big con

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  1. #11

    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Hong Kong, from UK
    Posts
    3,838
    Quote Originally Posted by Boris:
    Question - Can an employer choose to contribute to multiple providers or does the law mandate only one per employer account? If the former then it is easy for any employer to give a choice to employees and outside of pure greed I don't see the point in restricting choice on the latter.
    I wouldn't be surprised to find providers offering inducements for exclusive access to a company's employees - lower fees, etc. I know when I first came to Hong Kong, my then-employer had a similar deal with Standard Chartered which meant they would only pay salary into SC accounts...
    East_coast likes this.

  2. #12

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652
    Quote Originally Posted by Matt_NT:
    For me, I see it as a little additional tax
    I am not aware of any tax that goes straight to the bottom line of finance corporations. It really is just a sop to the finance industry to take money off every Hong Konger for very little effort. Not sure why the new administration has not tackled this, perhaps red packets are being paid at the highest level in town (Liaison office)...

  3. #13

    Join Date
    Sep 2008
    Posts
    3,677
    Quote Originally Posted by Boris:
    Question - Can an employer choose to contribute to multiple providers or does the law mandate only one per employer account? If the former then it is easy for any employer to give a choice to employees and outside of pure greed I don't see the point in restricting choice on the latter.
    Probably a matter of convenience to limit it to one, i.e. less parties to deal with for the admin/account department.


    My company is trying to switch providers as they are not happy with the performance of our current one; had 3 major providers visit us and do a presentation, one we disqualified due to a lackluster presentation, the other two cheated with their ratings (S&P etc) in their company introductions as they used those from 2011 (those from 2012 are of course worst). Both offered management fees of 1% but one of them for the first 5 years only, the other one without such limitation. Seems the management and some colleagues favor the latter as they also have a good track record and offer a wide range of funds to select from (15-20 I think, don't have the brochure with me).

    In that brochure they actually stated "N/A" for the expenses of funds not directly managed by them, so I asked why I would need to pay 1%, arguing that "N/A" should mean no fees - not expecting that to be true, but just for fun and see what they have to say. They tried to explain that the data would only be available for funds older than 6 months to which I pointed out that most of them were from at least 2011, so 6 months became 2 years bla bla.
    Frigging muppets but I guess we have no choice and select the best of the worst.

    Our current provider knows that we want to switch and now also offers a wider selection of funds and a discount of, wait for it, 0.05% on a handful of funds, most of which are somewhere around the 1.65-1.95 mark.