IS EPF ADVISORY THE NEXT FINTECH GOLDMINE?

About 16 million PF claims are rejected every year. Some startups say they can help

- Neil Borate & Aprajita Sharma

Mumbai-based Abhishek Shenoy (38) started his first job in 2008 but quit after a couple of years to study further. Later, he resumed his career and went on to work with multiple companies over the following years. Each time Shenoy switched jobs, he raised a transfer request to merge his previous employee provident fund (EPF) with the new one. To his surprise, the transfer never took place. "I spent two-three years pursuing this but to no avail. I used to get several errors while initiating the transfers and was clueless about the way forward. Lack of information in the public domain made the process tedious," he said.

At this point, Shenoy happened to find out about FinRight, a provident fund (PF) consulting startup founded by Mumbai-based Amey Kanekar, on LinkedIn. "I immediately reached out to them. It took them only three-four months to get it all sorted against a fee of 10,000-20,000," he said.

Ramya Lakshmanan has a similar story to tell. The Bengaluru-based employee had lost all hopes of accessing the money accumulated in her PF despite having worked with seven companies in a span of 15 years. Not a single account had been merged with the other.

"I had different PF accounts. One was managed by a trust; another was as a contractual employee; a couple of accounts had no link to Universal Account Number (UAN), and some had different UANs. It was a total mess," she said.

UAN is a 12-digit number provided by the Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) to have a single identifier for the multiple member identifications.