Is EPF Advisory the Next Fintech Goldmine?

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 or 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.

- Neil Borate & Aprajita Sharma

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 or 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.

Ramya's husband happened to find out about KustodianLife, a PF consulting startup, at a tech event. "We verified the company's credentials and reached out to them. The mess was cleaned up in just three or four months. I only shared my documents and a few contacts of my previous employers. I made a test withdrawal to see if everything was sorted, and it sure was," she said. "The fee turned out to be just 5% of the total PF balance finally accessible to me," she said.

Golden Opportunity
The EPFO has around 300 million members in total (of which 74 million are active contributors). Most members

The EPFO is based on a law passed in 1952, designed for an industrial workforce of the 1950s and 1960s, and hasn't been updated since.

are there by force—EPF enrollment is mandatory for organizations with more than 20 employees and the majority get caught up in a system too complex for them to understand.