Aware Super

Australia’s second-largest super fund will look to bridge the trust gap between industry funds and independent financial advisers (IFAs) as it expands further into the external advice space. Matt Willis, Aware Super’s head of business development, says the fund plans to build on the advice offering it acquired through its 2020 merger with WA Super…

Chant West, scheduled to hold its annual awards dinner this Wednesday evening, May 26, has announced the 10 finalists in the last two categories decided upon – Best Fund: Innovation and Best Fund: Integrity. Two funds are in both categories. The finalists are: Best Fund: Innovation – Aware Super, QSuper and its proposed merger partner…

KPMG believes $50 billion is about the minimum size for an APRA-regulated fund when the dust settles. Helen Rowell, the retiring deputy chair of APRA, believes it should be $30 billion. The figures were bandied about at the CMSF conference where mergers were discussed in some detail. Leeanne Turner, who has just been through one…

It’s not only the traditional core of Melbourne-based industry funds that can get political in the battle against climate change and growth. Aware Super, with a foundation membership of NSW public sector employees, has entered the fray. The fund commissioned and published Friday (May 7) a 65-page report written by social researcher Rebecca Huntley entitled…

If APRA wants to continue to encourage super fund mergers the regulator needs to make some changes to how it goes about its approvals process, according to one chief executive who is going through the process of having a successor fund transfer (TFR). Speaking at last weeks’ annual ASFA conference (on February 11), Leeanne Turner,…

Aware Super is re-thinking its international exposures, particularly relating to China, and how it manages them as it expects they will continue to grow in importance within the $130 billion fund’s overall portfolio. “We haven’t taken any money out [of China] but as a minority investor we just think we should pause at the moment,”…

Thanks largely to the mega funds of Japan, China, and Singapore, the Asia Pacific region heads the world in the concentration of the top 100 fiduciary investment organisations. And these funds are increasingly changing the philosophies and investment styles of all funds. A report published last week by the Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI), the independent…