The headline from the Dutch business newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad caught my eye on Twitter a few weeks ago: "America is the example of how not to do pensions." The quote was from an interview with Angelien Kemna, who stepped down on Nov. 1 from the top finance job at APG Groep N.V., which manages the Netherlands' biggest (and world's fifth-biggest) pension fund. After reading it, it struck me that it might be useful to let U.S. readers know what one of the leading figures on the global pension scene thought was wrong with the way this country handles retirement savings.
The Dutch retirement savings system, considered one of the world's best, is built around defined-benefit workplace pensions — as the U.S. system used to be. But while some pension funds are affiliated with a single company, such as Royal Dutch Shell P.L.C. or Koninklijke Philips N.V., industry-wide pension arrangements are the norm. APG manages ABP, the 405 billion-euro pension fund for workers in the public sector and education, and several smaller funds.
Before joining APG as chief investment officer in 2009 (she was promoted to chief finance and risk officer in 2014), Kemna was chief executive officer of ING Investment Management Europe and worked in various jobs at Dutch asset manager Robeco Groep NV. From 2007 to 2009, she taught part time at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she got her Ph.D. in finance, while living in Atlanta, where she got some firsthand experience of how the United States handles retirement. I spoke with Kemna by phone in mid-December. What follows is an abridged and edited transcript of our conversation.
Angelien Kemna: What I saw living in the United States was that so many people not only lost their jobs and houses during the financial crisis, they also lost more than half of their pensions, because their pensions were 401(k)s. These are individualized pensions with high fees. People don't understand the risks they take, they do not share risks over generations. It makes them extremely vulnerable in an area that is very important for them — their future life and safeguarding their future life.
I think that financial services organizations made a lot of money selling these things. People have extreme difficulty understanding pensions at all, and it's very easy to convince them to do things that might actually not be good for them.
That is something that I have been fighting against my whole life in the Netherlands, the shift to an individual system. You can top up individually if you want to, but the basis pension should be risk sharing between people of various ages.
JF: One thing that seems under-understood here is that it's not just the competence issue of whether individuals are good at investing for retirement, it's that in theory — and I think in practice in the Netherlands — it's cheaper to do it collectively, right?
AK: Oh, absolutely. And yes, we also suffered from the crisis as pension funds, but de minimis. We've totally recovered from the crisis, and I would say that the system has been shown to be pretty robust under market crises. Our system is less robust under longevity risk.
JF: That's every pension system in the world. I was just rereading a Bloomberg View piece by Satjayit Das on Australia's pension system, which is pretty highly acclaimed. The gist of his argument was that maybe none of these pension systems can actually work with the way populations are developing in wealthy countries, with people living a long time and also relatively low growth in the working-age population.
AK: Yes, exactly. I think none of the pension fund systems are robust enough against that. But in our system, we can cut off some at the top. We did that a couple of years ago where you don't get all these benefits from pensions and taxes if you make more than 100,000 euros a year as remuneration, and we could lower that. If you don't have to take the top, top, top salaries, that makes the pension system as a whole more affordable and more solid, more robust.
