HDFC Pension is seeing encouraging early signs from its push into India’s gig economy, with workers increasingly contributing to their National Pension System (NPS) accounts, according to Sriram Iyer, Managing Director and CEO of HDFC Pension.In an interaction, he said that the company’s partnerships with Zomato and Urban Company have fundamentally changed how it approaches pension adoption among gig workers.Unlike salaried employees, gig workers do not have an employer-employee relationship with platforms, making conventional pension enrolment difficult, he said.“The big aha moment for us was when we went to Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) and said we will need to create a process which is not cumbersome,” Mr. Iyer said, explaining that traditional employer-employee onboarding models were unsuitable for platform workers.Working with the regulatory, the Central Recordkeeping Agency (a key intermediary in the NPS architecture) and Zomato, he said, HDFC Pension used the e-Shram platform worker framework that gig workers already had to enable onboarding to the aggregator.“We used that KYC to create the Permanent Retirement Account Number (PRAN). In one shot we were able to create one and half lakh PRANs,” he said.The company found that merely opening pension accounts was not enough. Most delivery partners, many of whom live “really hand to mouth”, found retirement planning too distant to prioritise.To improve adoption, he said, they identified influential delivery partners to promote the product internally. The experience also reshaped HDFC Pension’s approach when it partnered with Urban Company, he added.“What we realised was that... we have to get the person to commit at the time of inception of the account,” Mr. Iyer said, adding that the two commitments included willingness to get enrolled and how much they are willing to contribute.Instead of opening the account first and seeking contributions later, he said, workers are asked upfront how much they wish to contribute every week. The contribution is then deducted directly from their weekly payouts, as platform workers are paid on a weekly settlement cycle.According to Mr. Iyer, the approach has yielded unexpectedly strong participation.“There are people who are contributing ₹5,000 in a week,” he said.“We called this person to see if he was really clear about what he was getting into?... And he said, ‘I know what I’m doing. I want to contribute ₹20,000 a month.’”Urban Company’s rollout began in Jaipur before expanding city by city, Iyer said.“Adoption level in Jaipur is 70% now,” Iyer said, adding that the company is following a phased rollout across Lucknow, Ahmedabad and other cities.The company said around two lakh PRANs have been created from Zomato’s gig workers and about 500 PRANs from Urban Company.The pension PFM tied up with Zomato in October last year and in January this year it tied up with Urban Company.Tech CapabilitiesBeyond gig workers, HDFC Pension has built a proprietary platform called NPS Pro over the past two years to reduce onboarding and servicing friction.Account opening, Mr. Iyer said, has been reduced to “a three-minute process,” using pre-populated data and direct integration with the record-keeper to generate a permanent retirement account number.The platform also automates two previously manual tasks: migrating accounts between retail and corporate registries or across record-keepers, and monthly contribution processing, which previously required nodal officers to manually reconcile active and inactive accounts.On Artificial Intelligence, Mr. Iyer said current use is focused on customer-facing tools such as calculators and personalised nudges, along with AI-enabled customer service, rather than fraud detection or risk management, which he described as still “early days.”HDFC Pension is also evaluating startups to enhance its tech capabilities through its parent group’s incubation programme, though Mr. Iyer said no formal agreements are in place yet.He said the larger priority for the industry is not fund-management performance but expanding the number of people saving through NPS. “This can potentially be a huge... source of patient capital,” he said.