Super

Australian Retirement Trust has warned that introducing more granularity into the YFYS test might only confuse members and that funds will incur greater transaction costs as new benchmarks are added to it.

Active Super and Vision Super will press ahead with a merger that will “lower costs and improve member services” in a sign of the times for smaller super funds.

The last 12 months have been challenging for Australian Retirement Trust, but the amount of noise in the market has been “quite productive”. It’s also shown that when it comes to unlisted assets, price is more volatile than value.

AustralianSuper CIO Mark Delaney believes the fund is harder on internal teams than external managers, but says that its unlisted property experience has been “the worst of all worlds”.

Jefferson & Shea Analytics will bring a new fee benchmarking service to Australia to get super funds a better deal from their external managers. The good managers will like it – the bad ones won’t.

A number of industry funds have invested in Nuveen’s US Cities Workplace Strategy as they diversify away from traditional real estate and harness thematics related to changing work and life patterns.

Proposed YFYS changes do nothing to address index hugging, according to AustralianSuper, and super funds should be compared to a universal industry benchmark rather than a larger and more complex set of indices in the performance test.

Megafunds are outstripping APRA’s ability to regulate them effectively, according to a panel of super executives, while private asset valuations are a source of “real tension” between funds and the government despite its big nation-building push.

Super funds are double-checking their marketing materials and coming to grips with an evolving regulatory regime as greenwashing risk looms large.

Competition in super is heating up but it’s not yet come to the boil. Mergers, member retention and retirement are all shaping up as key battlegrounds for funds.

The government will continue to tweak the Your Future Your, Super benchmarks to provide certainty on sustainable investing and give ASIC more funding to combat greenwashing as global climate action heats up.

Members back the idea of industry funds and the government working together on nation-building projects – if the returns stack up. Convincing them that they actually do will be key.