韩国媒体周末特稿：退休养老金账户70%风险资产上限令券商ETF自动定投服务失效，监管与雇佣劳动部仍在评估、未形成结论

A 40-something office worker surnamed Cho, who uses an automated ETF accumulation service for retirement savings, was taken aback by a recent text message. Cho had set up a monthly purchase of five shares of the KODEX U.S. Nasdaq 100 ETF through an individual retirement pension (IRP) account, only to be notified that the order had failed for two straight months. "I was told that because I had already used up the risk-asset limit in my IRP, additional purchases would be difficult for the time being unless I reorganized my portfolio," Cho said.
The automated ETF accumulation service for retirement pensions, launched to make life easier for savers who manage their own retirement accounts, is falling short of its purpose. Industry participants say the 70% cap on risk-asset holdings in retirement pension accounts is preventing the service from delivering the benefits savers expected.
Major domestic brokerages including Mirae Asset Securities, Korea Investment & Securities, Samsung Securities, KB Securities and NH Investment & Securities offer the pension ETF accumulation service for IRP and defined contribution (DC) retirement accounts, according to the financial investment industry on the 6th. The service lets investors pick the securities they want and buy them automatically at regular intervals, allowing steady purchases of ETFs and other products in the amounts and on the dates they choose.
Because retirement pension products are built for long-term investing, most users of the service concentrate their purchases on U.S. index ETFs, which are classified as risk assets. As of the 4th, the three most popular products among users of Samsung Securities' pension ETF accumulation service were the KODEX U.S. S&P 500, the KODEX U.S. Nasdaq 100 and the TIGER U.S. S&P 500, the brokerage said.
The problem is that retirement pension rules cap risk-asset holdings at 70%, meaning that anyone buying ETFs and other risk assets over an extended period will inevitably breach the threshold. Investors are then left to rebalance their portfolios by hand, repeatedly increasing their pension contributions or raising the share of safe assets such as qualified target date funds (TDFs) and deposits to stay under the 70% line.
That undercuts the convenience the accumulation service was meant to provide. "When the risk-asset limit is exceeded, there is nothing we can do beyond sending a notice that the automated purchase cannot go through," a brokerage executive said. "The structure leaves customers to redo their own asset allocation, so there is not much a brokerage can do."
Critics also note that with risk assets capped at 70% of a retirement account, principal-protected deposits and government bonds alone can only take returns so far. Time deposits offer expected returns of just 3% to 4% a year. Woori Bank's one-year retirement pension time deposit for DC and IRP accounts, for example, pays about 3.30%.
As a result, many in the industry argue that the 70% cap should be eased further. A substantial number of investors already push their effective equity exposure to as much as 85% by putting the remaining 30% into bond-mixed ETFs, a practice done in plain sight. Financial regulators and the Ministry of Employment and Labor are reviewing the industry's calls for a further easing of the risk-asset limit, but no conclusion has been reached. "We are looking at this broadly," an official at the authorities said.