This year’s top 10 stories included a peek into AustralianSuper’s international equities build out in London, AMP’s move to slash employee benefits, and plenty of hard-hitting analysis of the issues that matter in institutional investment. But the real story is how readers helped shape all of that coverage.
Orbis’ Stuart Place is riding from Melbourne to the Moon and Back to fund a treatment for the “monster of a disease” that his youngest son was born with. The investment industry is rallying behind him.
Editor’s note: For members, it’s no longer all about the money
2024 was the year that proved markets can march higher even to the drumbeat of war, political uncertainty and general macro weirdness, and so it was a pretty good year for super returns. But it was also the year that proved those returns don’t matter as much as they used to. After all, what good is a big retirement balance if your fund isn’t equipped to help you spend it? Or if you can’t access it? Or if you don’t know that retirement balance is actually split across two accounts, both of which you’re being charged fees and insurance premiums for?
Super funds are accumulation machines. But they’ll have to become a lot of other things too – and fast – if they want to maintain their status as the trusted guarantors of most Australians’ financial future. It was Cbus, with its failure to pay out death and disability benefits on time, that threw some of these issues into stark contrast. But the problem is generalised across the industry.
There’s no reason that Australia’s biggest super fund should be unaware, for years, that its members had multiple accounts. There’s no reason that anybody wanting information on their super fund should have to wait hours on the phone to get it. And there’s no reason that a retiree shouldn’t have a strategy, that they understand, to help them enjoy their retirement rather than hoarding their money for fear of running out.
The media plays a role in this too. For years, June 30 has been the start of a flurry of announcements about just how much super funds have made for their members over the last financial year, and a flurry of media coverage of the same – this publication included. But the focus on who made 10 per cent versus, say, 9 per cent, is useless without a stronger focus on retirement, administration, and systems uplift; the nuts and bolts, the plumbing of the fund.
That’s not to say that funds aren’t trying to do better, or that they have everything they need to do better. There are things that the government still needs to do, particularly around advice in retirement. And regulators need to lose their myopic focus on costs and realise that there are some things worth spending money on; if a higher administration fee gets members a better experience, many will (or should) be willing to pay it.
These things take time, of course, but time is running out. Super funds have been so successful that any failure is amplified – it affects more members, and more money, than ever before. There’s lots to be done, and most of it will have to be done in the next few years. Because someday, when it’s time to talk about returns on June 30, we might find that nobody is listening.
