APRA

Margaret Cole, APRA’s new executive for superannuation, has brought the super war to its most unlikely, and probably reluctant, combatants: members. Faced with the disappointing reality that few have moved out of their underperforming fund in the aftermath of the performance test, Cole has resorted to browbeating them into it. “It has been just over…

The accusations of insider trading hurled at Australia’s big super funds are explosive in nature – and pose something of a headscratcher. Regardless of their weight, reputations are at stake. The revelations made by ASIC on Wednesday last week (October 27) are a tough wake-up call for an industry that prides itself on its duty…

A significant chunk of super fund advertising could now be on ice, with APRA finding that marketing expenditure could not be shown to have improved members’ financial position. As stapling puts a nail in the coffin of default distribution, many of Australia’s biggest super funds have turned their attention to the dark art of advertising…

Geoff Summerhayes, former APRA executive, concedes that while the short-term nature of the Your Future Your Super (YFYS) test is a “challenge” for ESG investment, climate change is a mega-trend that demands more attention. One of the main frustrations around the YFYS performance test has been that climate change does not occur on a regimented…

The 88,000 members of Australian Catholic Superannuation and Retirement Fund (ACSRF) are about to be very confused. As are members of some other big super funds. Forty-year-old members in ACSRF’s default MySuper product, LifetimeOne, will be told they just earned an average 20.9 per cent from their super (after fees and taxes for the year…

The merger between Media Super and Cbus has been delayed until the first half of next year due to several factors demonstrating the complexity of these transactions. In its first communication on the merger with its members since the December 2020 announcement, Media Super sent a note to them last week (September 1) advising them…

Despite APRA’s move to name and shame 13 underperforming funds, it’s clear that Your Future Your Super (YFYS) is a work in progress. More needs to be done to make it a true and fair test. Call them the Dirty (Baker’s) Dozen: 13 funds named and publicly shamed for their failure of the YFYS performance…

With the passage of Your Future Your Super through the Senate, the Morrison Government won a key victory against the superannuation industry. A bigger fight looms over the scheduled SG increase. While it wasn’t quite the utter dismemberment faced by the Government’s industrial relations Bill in April 2021, the YFYS reforms were significantly altered by…

Industry fund-owned ‘The New Daily’ is once again in political hot water after a controversial deal with AustralianSuper to auto-subscribe 800,000 of the fund’s members to the publication. ‘The New Daily’ has become a bee in the bonnet for a number of Liberal backbenchers, most notably NSW Senator Andrew Bragg, who has characterised the publication…

It’s approaching orthodoxy that a merger is always in the best interests of members. But is bigger always better? What is the true price of scale? Leeanne Turner, Spirit Super’s inaugural chief executive, told a CMSF audience in May: “If you’re not considering a merger then you either have your head in the sand or…