new delhi there is a rs 300000crore reason to cheer for the ailing fund management industry the countrys largest retirement fundthe employees provident fund organisation epfois kicking off the process to appoint new fund managers from april 2011epfo had abolished state bank of indias monopoly on its investment management in september 2008 at the time hsbc asset management company amc reliance capital amc and icici prudential amc were picked along with sbi for a twoyear tenure from among 21 interested players in the fray with their term coming to an end in march 2011 epfo is keen to get their replacements ready well in timethe idea that competition improves efficiency has hit home for epfo which had just one banker and fund manager for nearly 56 years incumbent manager sbi who often kept epf monies idle in the past has pulled up its socks in the last two years more importantly in 200910 the first full year under the new fund managers the pf office had a surplus for the first time in seven years the upa government propped by the left parties in its first innings had emptied out the epfos reserves to keep the epf rate at a politically acceptable levelfor fund houses the race for epfos mandate will be more aggressively fought this time the retirement funds corpus has grown at over 40 in the last two years that the equitylaced new pension scheme nps has delivered higher returns than the epf rate is expected to help prod open stock market investments in the moribund epfowe would definitely bid to manage the pf money said a balasubramanian ceo of birla sun life mutual fund which manages close to rs 70000 crore in assets we have good infrastructure people and a strong risk management process which can be leveraged for managing such a large corpus he added in the first round itself epfs fund management cost dropped to 00063 001 of its corpus sharply lower than what sbi charged as a monopoly tempted by the huge corpus at stake some bidders like hdfc amc and birla sunlife amc even agreed to manage it for free but the epfo had rejected their zerofee bidsso industry would make every decimal point count this time around to put that in context initial fund management fees for the nps under the pension fund regulatory and development authority were just 3 to 5 basis points 003005 but when new managers were invited to manage citizens voluntary savings under the scheme the fees plummeted to a mere 00009 the selection of new fund managers will entail as many as nine steps from inviting expressions of interest to getting the epfo boards approval creditrating agency crisil had helped in the 2008 selection process and has been monitoring the fund managers performance for epfo on wednesday the epfo boards finance committee would consider a proposal to invite all creditrating agencies registered with the securities exchange board of india to help the retirement fund select