The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) today launched its latest offering, i-Invest. It is a self-service online platform that is accessible within the Members section of i-Akaun and enables eligible members to directly invest a portion of their Account 1 savings into unit trust funds offered by EPF-approved Fund Management Institutions (FMIs).
In his speech EPF Chairman Tan Sri Samsudin Osman said,
“This new era with its push for constant innovation has given the EPF the opportunity to disrupt the financial industry and transform our ways in order to give better value to our members.
“The i-Invest not only enables eligible members to self-manage their own unit trust funds, it also empowers them with the information to access, analyse, monitor and transact online, effectively providing the opportunity to increase their investing literacy.”
With the launch of i-Invest, the EPF claims they are now the first retirement fund in the world to link members’ retirement funds to online investment services. The beta version of i-Invest was released on 19 August, and within a month, nearly 2,500 members have transacted a total value of RM32 million.
Tan Sri Samsudin emphasised that for the EPF to effectively carry out its mission to secure a resilient future for members, it has to be agile, embrace change, and self-disrupt its ways of working.
Chief Executive Officer Tunku Alizakri Alias echoed that in recent years, digital technology has had a largely positive impact on how people invest as they are enabled by the rich resource of information that is easily available through the Internet.
“We developed i-Invest to empower our members to take charge of their financial future with tools that will allow them to make informed decisions, starting with their unit trust investments,”
he said.
“With these tools, members can track and monitor their investments, and understand which of the investments available best meet their needs. This is an important advantage in today’s increasingly volatile and challenging financial markets.”
Tunku Alizakri revealed that i-Invest would directly impact over 2.3 million eligible EPF members, and that the availability of investing information on the platform was in line with the Malaysian National Strategy for Financial Literacy 2019-2023. “Educating the public means also that the EPF must be willing to open access to the tools and resources to enable greater and faster learning.
“To encourage financial literacy among our members, we must first give them the freedom and flexibility to independently manage their own investments.”
Featured image credit: KWSP Malaysia Facebook
