PIPs are more expensive than open-ended pension funds. A real-world test
The analysis was carried out on products offered by companies that have both instruments in their range. The comparison always shows the fund to be the winner
‘The Individual Pension Plan (PIP) is a supplementary pension scheme set up through a life insurance policy, which can only be taken out on an individual basis, regardless of employment status.’ This definition comes from COVIP, the pension fund supervisory authority, which has an excellent glossary on its website (www.covip.it) for anyone wishing to find out more about pension funds.
PIPs have always been more expensive than other pension products. According to Covip. Here, we have focused in particular on the 16 companies that offer both PIPs and open-ended pension funds in Italia. Well, over a ten-year time horizon, the synthetic cost index (Isc) of a Pip is always higher than that of an open-ended pension fund marketed by the same company and in the same category, with the exception of one case.
The analysis of Covip data (reference year 2025, data as at 17 June 2026) was the financial education website Investimi.com, founded by Matteo Todeschi, a 33-year-old civil engineer from Rovereto with a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a background in Silicon Valley. “Investimi.com is a financial education project,” says Todeschi, “created to help people understand how to manage their money better and make more informed financial decisions.”
The ranking list
Of the 16 companies analysed, open-ended pension funds and PIPs within the same category were therefore compared across various time horizons: in particular, over the 10-year period, in 27 out of 32 cases, the PIP recorded a higher ISC than the open-ended pension fund marketed by the same company, and the average difference for this time frame is +0.75 percentage points (p.p.).
The company with the highest cost gap, again over a 10-year period, is Vera Vita in the single ‘balanced’ category: the ISC rises from 1.27 per cent for the pension fund to 2.89 per cent for the PIP, representing a gap of +1.61 percentage points. In second place is CNP Vita, which has two categories (equity and balanced) and a cost gap of +1.24 percentage points. “The latter figure is the average of the averages of the two available categories,” explains Todeschi. In third place is Axa-Mps, also with two categories, whose cost gap is +1.02 percentage points.
