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.
Coenraads retires from investment coalface
Paul Coenraads, the manager investment operations at Australian Catholic Superannuation and a former head of investments at Mine Super, retired last week (July 8) after nearly 40 years in the industry.
Coenraads, who recently turned 60, said his retirement had long been planned. He and his wife bought a home at scenic Fingal Bay, north of Sydney, and moved there in April to spend the next phase of their lives. The move coincides with the planned merger of ACS with NGS Super, the management and trustee details of which are yet to be announced.
“My wife and I are planning a proper retirement,” he said. “We have well and truly planned our leisure activities. I have joined the local ocean swimming group and I’m paddle boarding. It’s close to the beach and, when we can, we want to travel.”
He said he was open to suggestions to perhaps join a board or committee in the industry but was not actively seeking a position and was likely to get involved with charity work.
“One of the things I did at Auscoal (the former name for Mine Super), was to create a community awareness program,” he said. “The program was enthusiastically supported by management and staff and had two streams: we put aside a budget to match, dollar for dollar, the funds raised by staff for charitable causes. Secondly, a volunteering program, where teams were encouraged to identify and support community-based activities such as Christmas toy drives, hamper packing and blood donations. I fostered a partnership with Mission Australia, who support disadvantaged children and families and assist people with mental illness and disabilities in and around Newcastle (the base for Auscoal). This provided staff lots of opportunities for voluntary activities. I remember my investment team volunteering at Newcastle’s Soul Café, donating food, then cooking and serving hot meals to people who were going through hard times. It was very rewarding.”
For most of his career, Coenraads had been at the coalface of investments, overseeing operations. He believes that the big changes in the institutional investment space over the years have been good for the end users, either as members or customers. He said the fund mergers, leading to fewer and larger funds, with knock-on trends such as investment insourcing, were ultimately increasing the professionalism within the industry.
And in the sector in which he specialised – investment operations – the current ‘front-to-back’ trend, where service providers are increasingly offering whole-of-business services – was good for the big super funds and fund managers which are clients of the custodian banks for which Coenraads worked in the first half of his career.
He says he always had an interest in finance and after leaving school he had various jobs as a junior trader, portfolio manager and in backoffices while he put himself through university for a business degree.
He joined the former Westpac master custody business in 1994 and then moved to State Street before moving again to the former Commonwealth Bank custody business after it acquired State Street’s superannuation business. Not liking the uncertainty of yet another corporate takeover, he accepted an offer from Bryan Gray, also recently retired, who was head of sales and marketing at J.P. Morgan. Commonwealth’s custody business was acquired by NAB.
Coenraads said he enjoyed his career and was grateful for the opportunities afforded him.
He is particularly grateful to Bruce Watson, then chief executive of Auscoal, for his time there after leaving J.P. Morgan, and to Greg Cantor, current chief executive of Australian Catholic Super who hired him for the role reporting to CIO Michael Block.
“J.P. Morgan was a turning point for me,” he says. “All my clients were super funds. I liked working with them and I was inspired by the industry funds’ philosophy and the way they were making a real difference to real people’s lives.”
Bruce Watson employed Coenraads and he subsequently spent seven years there, becoming part of the executive team and being appointed investments head.
It took him about 90 minutes to drive to the office near Newcastle from the family home near Berowra in the days before the fund had a Sydney office. He joined ACS in January 2014.
Coenraads is also appreciative of the efforts of various industry bodies, especially the work of FEAL (Fund Executives Association Ltd), which awarded him with a scholarship to attend the London School of Economics in London in 2012 for a course called ‘Beyond Rationality: Behavioural Economics and the Modern Society’ and also, before that, a scholarship covering the costs of obtaining the IMCA ‘certified investment management analyst’ designation which helped his career progression at Auscoal.
