The Employee Provident Fund Organisation website is undergoing a major revamp — with plans for a new portal, use of AI-powered language translation tools and other facilities in the works. The reforms come days after EPFO announced liberalised withdrawal norms and heralded a UPI-linked facility for users.
“There will be a complete revamp under EPFO 3.0, new architecture, core banking solution at the backend. We will be able to cater in terms of scale, to all the organised and unorganised workers. It will take into account the increase in volumes. The entire system will change including the portal. As of now, incremental changes are happening, the next phase will take care of all future needs,” an official told The Indian Express.
The retirement fund body currently has nearly 8 crore active members and maintains a corpus of around Rs 28 lakh crore.
What are the changes?
A senior government official told The Indian Express that the revamp will include a new portal and new software at the backend to take into account all possible expansion over the next decade. It will also incorporate AI-powered language translation tools to give information to members in vernacular languages. EPFO 3.0 will ensure a major overhaul of the EPFO technology architecture as it moves towards a core banking solution and a centralised system of operations.
The changes come months after the retirement fund body began expanding its scale to cover both organised and unorganised sector workers under the new Labour Codes. EPFO is likely to hand over administration of the fund for unorganised workers — separate from the social security fund for gig and platform workers.
Efforts to finalise a tender for the selection of a suitable agency have now reached the final vetting stages. Officials said it was “broadly prepared” and assured that it would be “floated soon”. The ongoing second phase of the reforms or EPFO 2.0 has also reached its final stages — with only three modules remaining. The UPI-linked facility is expected to be rolled out by April.
Withdrawing EPF money through UPI?
Sources told PTI last week that efforts were currently underway to allow withdrawal of employees’ provident funds via the Unified Payments Interface gateway. The labour ministry is reportedly working on a project where a certain proportion of the EPF will be frozen, and a large chunk will be available for withdrawal through their bank account using UPI. The option is likely to become available by April 2026.
Subscribers will be able to see the eligible EPF balance available for transferring into their seeded bank accounts. They will be allowed to use their linked UPI pin for completing the transaction and ensure a secure transfer of money into their bank accounts.