Super

With two years of double-digit super returns under its belt, Colonial First State’s investment team is taking a hard look at markets and moving money to areas where they think they’ll make more of it.

With three separate businesses now combined under the Insignia banner, MLC Asset Management CIO Dan Farmer says his focus is no longer on “fixing problems” but on driving returns – and he’s looking to niche asset classes to do it.

The two funds are pressing on with their “merger of equals” after hammering out the new entity’s board and leadership structure, promising complementary capabilities across retirement and advice, as well as fee savings for members.

Nearly every Australian has super, but its settings don’t work for every Australian, according to the First Nations Foundation, which is advocating for changes around estate planning and the preservation age to make the system fairer.

Some members are excited for retirement, while others approach it with a “real sense of shame and fear”. Funds are going to have to figure out how to cater to both groups or risk failing them all.

Opening up early access to super for housing would have a negative effect on the balances of even those members that don’t dig into their savings, with funds forced to adopt more conservative investment strategies and hold more liquid assets.

The circa $88 billion industry fund for workers in health and community services reckons that alleviating the affordable housing crisis will boost its other investments by easing the cost of living and inflation.

The RBA says that super funds’ long investment horizons are a positive for the stability of the financial system but that widening access to the savings they contain would require more careful liquidity management.

New Zealand’s sovereign wealth has set its future 20-year rolling returns forecast well above the risk-free rate but below the annualised 10 per cent it achieved in its first two decades of operation.

It’s “quite realistic” that many super funds will take too long to build the basics of a retirement income strategy, and the system might need a licencing regime to make sure members are getting the best service.

Having handed its custody to State Street, Australian Ethical has selected the Charles River Investment Management Solution to automate its front and middle office processes for its entire investment portfolio.

While there’s a perception that defined benefit funds have mostly vanished from the earth, they still manage a hefty chunk of Australia’s pension savings and DC funds can learn a lot from them in their efforts to solve the retirement problem for their members