QSuper

After announcing his departure from the role, Australian Retirement Trust chief Bernard Reilly tells ISN why the fund “hasn’t missed a beat” since the merger that created it and how the arrival of the megafunds heralds a new era of “co-opetition” in the super industry.

Size, internalisation and globalisation are now front of mind for every large fund in Australia – but every fund approaches them differently, and there’s little agreement on the benefits of the new offshore push.

The latest iteration of the Your Future Your Super test has dispatched a large swathe of trustee-directed products even as APRA acknowledges that many are selected for reasons beyond performance.

Big super funds are getting even bigger. But as consolidation continues – and stapling kicks in – they’ve got a new problem that can’t easily be overcome: they’re more alike than different.

As merger activity continues apace, State Street – armed with its “unique” front-to-back solution – intends to take a dominant position as custodian of choice for the biggest end of town. The super industry and its custodians are now exiting a period of relative stability. The number of funds has more than halved in the…

This is the last edition of Investor Strategy News for the year. We will next publish on January 10, 2022. Here are some thoughts on the year past, based on reader reactions to our stories. Our most popular for the year was our coverage of the Australian Catholic Superannuation and Retirement Fund’s APRA performance test…

Fund managers are subject to behavioural biases like all of us, such as over-confidence, short-termism and memory distortions. Take their predictive abilities. They are not, on average, especially good. In a unique report for clients, Frontier has published what amounts to a longitudinal study based on eight years of conversations, surveys and other communications with…

The first thing funds usually consider in a merger is cost to member – but that won’t necessarily be what leaves them better off. The trick is getting the alignment right. According to David Carruthers, senior consultant and head of the members solutions group at Frontier, the top priority for any fund considering a merger…

Cashed-up industry funds are expected to be leaders leader in post-pandemic M&A activity as investors begin to see the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel. While Fidelity anticipates that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a structural shift in consumer and market behaviour, the increased certainty provided by reopening means that M&A activity will…

Magellan Financial Group’s ‘FuturePay’, launched with a fanfare last week (June 1) after considerable pre-launch publicity, heralds an escalation in a retirement products arms race. Both big super funds and fund managers are scrambling for positions in the race, which is expected to have strong demographically driven growth for years to come. Magellan, arguably the…