National Pension Service

The National Pension Service is a public pension plan sponsor for the country of South Korea that is based out of Seoul. The organization was founded in 1987 as the National Pension Corporation with a goal of providing “Korean Nationals with income security and promote welfare by providing pension benefits in old age or in the event of disability or death.” National Pension Service would launch its National Pension Scheme a year later and continue to expand its services in the 1990s, expanding its compulsory coverage to include rural individuals, foreigners, and others and establishing the National Pension Research in 1995. Its compulsory coverage would expand to include every single person in Korea in 199, the same year that the organization would launch the National Pension Fund Management Center. The system continued to expand, becoming renamed to its current National Pension Service in 2007 and opening the NPS International Service Center in 2009 and International Service Center in 2011. The National Pension Service is currently the fourth largest pension fund in the world with over 380 billion in total assets. The service operates through an extensive network that includes 102 regional offices, 52 service centers, 5 call centers, and a head office. The National Pension Service is now available to all employees, employers, and self-employed individuals and currently provides a wide variety of services including retirement planning, welfare, pension history management, benefits payment, collecting pension contributions, implementing welfare business, and managing the national pension fund. It invests in a variety of public equity, fixed income, and alternative investment markets on a global scale. National Pension Service invests most heavily in the information technology and finance sectors, which each make up approximately a fifth of its total allocated assets, and also invests in the health care, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, energy, and industrials sectors, among others to a lesser degree, in order of decreasing allocation.