superannuation

Big super seems to be experiencing an identity crisis. But former federal treasurer Wayne Swan has provided a unifying vision for Australia’s gargantuan pool of retirement savings. Former federal treasurer Wayne Swan’s speech at ASFA’s 2022 conference comes as super experiences something of an identity crisis. Executives are fretting over how to maintain their culture…

The problem with high expectations is that you have to keep meeting them. And after a year where some funds returned 20 per cent, investors and super members are expecting more, more, more. Investors are relentlessly cheerful creatures. According to Schroders’ latest Global Investor Study, Australian investors (defined here as those expecting to invest the…

Last week was a big one for the chief executives of AustralianSuper and Cbus. Their funds announced record-setting returns for the financial year and the next day they both took another hammering from a Commonwealth parliamentary committee. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, chaired by Tim Wilson, a Liberal MP, is often enlivened…

Super funds have battled with providing financial advice for decades but have not yet found a solution that can make it affordable and efficient for millions of low-balance members. Digital advice – including ‘robo’ – which in theory solves the affordable problem, has also been a decades-long dream for Australian wealth management, a revolution in…

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…

The Future Fund has come first out of the world’s 100 largest sovereign and public pension funds in the latest ranking by the Global SWF group on governance, sustainability and resilience. It is the second year in a row that the Australian fund has been the only one to score positively in all of the…

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…

The NZ Government will release climate risk scenario guidance for the financial and corporate sectors by year-end to support impending new carbon reporting standards. Alex White, Ministry for the Environment (MFE) sustainable finance team leader, told a funds industry gathering in Auckland last week that the in-production scenario analyses would help NZ investors better understand…

The rhetoric was similar, though not quite as fiery. But the audience was different. A lot has changed since the first CMSF, held symbolically, in Wollongong. In 1990, Wollongong, NSW, was still referred to as the ‘steel city’. BHP had only begun to shut down its furnaces in Australia. Labor was in power federally and…

Club Plus Super, the NSW-based industry fund representing primarily the employees of licensed clubs, has elected AustralianSuper as its preferred merger partner. In a joint announcement last week (May 13), Stefan Strano, the chief executive of Club Plus, said that exploring a merger was in the best interest of members. The funds have signed a…