(Yicai) Jan. 24 -- China’s regulators will relax review criteria to encourage overseas asset managers registered in China to participate in the country’s burgeoning pension market, Yicai learned from a document recently released by a department under the country’s securities watchdog.

The qualifications required for pension fund managers will be adjusted, according to the report by the China Securities Regulatory Commission’s Department of Public Offering Supervision. Foreign fund managers will be allowed to include the assets under management by their overseas parent firms in order to meet the business scale requirements needed to manage pension funds.

According to the previous regulatory requirements, with the exception of money market funds, fund managers which intended to set up pension funds must have managed assets of more than CNY20 billion (USD2.7 billion) in the past three years, an industry insider told Yicai. J.P. Morgan Asset Management China is the only foreign fund manager in the country which can meet this requirement.

But if they are allowed to include the assets managed by their overseas parent firms, this will open the door for foreign fund managers to engage in China’s pension fund management sector, the person said.

"Now that the requirements for operating scale have been relaxed, our company has begun to design new pension fund products and to prepare the business layout,” a person in charge of a foreign fund manager told Yicai.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor