business - pensions
Vidanova Pension Fund Foundation th celebrates its 45 anniversary! Vidanova (formerly SPU) is a foundation whose beginnings date back to April 25th, 1968. In November of that same year, the Public Notary, Dr. Jacob Schiltkamp, passed a deed to transfer the assets from Stichting Pensioenfonds OGEM Nederland BV to the local foundation. In 1977, Vidanova became an independent entity from the founding company OGEM, and since then, Vidanova has had its own Board of Trustees. It is supervised by the Central Bank of Curaçao and St. Maarten as mandated by law for the management of all private pension funds.
This year Vidanova celebrated its 45th anniversary. In light of this milestone, Business Magazine interviewed executive director, Rafael Pichardo. Pichardo became involved with Vidanova in 1986 and was appointed as executive director in 1997. Since then, the company has grown by leaps and bounds, with a fivefold increase in sponsors and a tripling of assets. Vidanova, under the lead of Pichardo, has also contributed significantly to the research and development of the future of pensions on Curaçao and has played an integral role in paving the way towards complete pension reform.
Curaçao Business Magazine (CBM): What would you like the general public to know about Vidanova? Rafael Pichardo (RP): We are a multi-employer pension fund, which means sponsors in the private sector can join the fund. What we basically do, is we administer pension plans and manage the assets and the liabilities for these companies, which are established on the islands of the former Netherlands Antilles. In 1968, the company started with 8 sponsors, 1 pension plan, just over 400 participants and 4.8 million in assets. This year, Vidanova celebrated its 45th anniversary on April 25th and we now have 12 pension plans, over 4,200 participants, and, up until the first quarter of 2013, our asset base grew to over 750 million. We have also grown tremendously on both a quantitative and qualitative basis in terms of providing better service
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C u r a ç a o b u s i ne s s
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to our sponsors. In our 45 years we’ve never had underfunding; our funding ratio has always been above 100%. We have had a long-term net fund return of over 7% over that period of time. We have tried to maintain the buying power of our pensioners as high as possible by providing them with indexation. For instance, since 1988 going forward, we have indexed on average 2% per year. We are ISO 9001 certified, a certification for quality management. We have a board in which sponsors and participants have representation under an independent president. We are transparent in what we do and on a yearly basis we provide a report of our performance to both the participants and to the sponsors. We have a total of eight employees and we do all of the internal work of the company ourselves. Of course, we use an independent actuary from the Netherlands for certification and we use Price Waterhouse Coopers as our external auditor. We are very proud of what we have achieved over the 45 years. I can probably say that it’s a remarkable development that has taken place over that time.
CBM: Can anyone open a pension agreement with Vidanova? RF: We are a foundation that administers collective pension plans. This means that a sponsor with Vidanova can be an organization that collectively consists of two or more individuals. We aren’t allowed to enter into agreements with individu-
