According to La Tercera, a group of former Principal Financial Group executives is preparing a new pension fund administrator (AFP, Chile's private pension fund managers) called AFP Impulsa. Its partners expect to file the formal application in December with the Superintendencia de Pensiones, the agency that oversees the pension system. No other outlet has confirmed the report.
The project is led by Mariano Ugarte, former CEO of Principal Afore México and of Principal Asset Management Chile, together with Cristián Edwards, who also comes from Principal. That US company controls AFP Cuprum in Chile. Ugarte told the outlet that both worked there for almost 20 years.
Their goal is the next member tender, the mechanism through which the State assigns new contributors to the AFP offering the lowest fee. The first call will be in August 2027, the award in December of that year and the transfer of people in June 2028.
Before that, Impulsa needs what is known as a provisional certificate of existence. This is an initial authorization that allows it to take part in the auction. Ugarte expects to obtain it between March and April. If they win, the entity becomes a formal AFP and starts receiving clients.
The owner of the future AFP will be Launchpad Capital, a company Ugarte and Edwards originally created to develop real estate funds. According to Ugarte, the plan changed when they read the pension reform and saw a business opportunity.
Two other founding partners joined the company, Christian Johow and Carlos Ossandón. Together, the four put up the capital needed to reach the tender. After that they began seeking backing capital, although the source does not provide amounts or names of those investors.
For now, the team consists of the two leaders and two other people with operational experience. Ugarte explained that it does not yet make sense to hire staff below management level, because whoever wins the tender has six months to get the operation running.
To attract talent, they plan an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), a program in which workers receive an ownership stake in the company. It is like paying part of the salary with a piece of the company they help build.
Ugarte acknowledged to La Tercera that the specific rules of the auction have not yet been published. Even so, he believes they will not be very different from what he has projected. In his view, the business is attractive only for those who know the industry: "If they tell me: go run supermarkets, I'm going to do badly".
The big attraction, and also the main risk, is the volume. Unlike previous tenders, the winning AFP will receive 1.2 million people in a single day. To put it in perspective, it is as if the entire population of a large city switched administrators overnight.
Ugarte admitted that this brings significant operational risk and that this is where experience helps. In return, the new AFP would immediately reach the scale that took others years to build. That scale makes it possible to spread fixed costs across more members.
If you are a new worker, this affects you directly. The more companies compete in the auction, the more pressure there is to lower the fee deducted from your salary. Impulsa joins other players that, according to the outlet, are already hiring people to enter the industry.
Impulsa's timeline is as follows: application to the Superintendencia in December, provisional authorization between March and April, and the opening of the tender in August 2027.
