A new report “from the coalface” of super fund investing has gone some way to quantifying the cost of shonky investment management, with members potentially losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Surging equity markets have driven the Future Fund’s return higher, but its prediction that inflation will be stickier than expected has been born out and it “remains conscious of the potential for significant deterioration”.
Senior hire from Mercer coincides with Link restructure
The Link Group has merged its ‘operations’ and ‘technology and innovation’ teams and brought the operations units of both its corporate markets – the share registry business – and fund administration divisions together under Paul Gardiner.
Gardiner’s new title will be chief operations, technology and innovation officer, according to an internal memo sent to Link staff last week.
The restructure and Gardiner’s promotion coincide with the recruitment from super admin competitor Mercer of Nigel McCammon in the role of chief operations officer, Asia Pacific, for the Operations, Technology and Innovation division, reporting to Gardiner in Sydney. His role at Mercer was head of Mercer Administration Services.
Mercer acquired the NSW Government super admin business, Pillar, in late 2016 although Link tends to see its main admin competitor as Sunsuper, the big industry fund has merged with several big super funds in recent years, and operates its own system, which it acquired from global systems company SunGard some years ago.
The memo also reveals that Link is to move its main admin hub in Sydney from Rhodes to Parramatta and McCammon will oversee that relocation, due to take place in 2021. That move should please most of the staff, Parramatta being a more bustling and cosmopolitan area.
For its part, Link acquired the small (manager) fund administration business White Outsourcing in February 2017 for an undisclosed sum and then the very big European fund admin business known as Capita Asset Services for about A$1.5 billion in July 2017. It then announced the sale of the corporate and private clients part of this business for A$450 million in January this year.
Gardiner recruited Paul Khoury, a former head of operations for State Street Australia, to run the local fund admin business.
John McMurtrie, the group managing director, is to continue to act in the role of head of super admin for the time being, the position vacated by Suzanne Holden last year.
The memo says: “These changes will create synergies and enhanced opportunities for product, process and service innovation, supporting one of our core strategic pillars being product and service innovation. They will also more clearly integrate our efforts across the organisation around innovation, operations and client service.”
– G.B.
