There was once a time when Australian’s relationship with their retirement savings was a distant one, at best. But with the introduction of compulsory superannuation in 1992 and superannuation choice in 2005, many Australians have taken a much stronger interest in their relationships with their funds and the organisations who manage them.
Funds themselves have stepped up to this challenge with a steady stream of announcements regarding enhanced member engagement platforms and ongoing spending on core management capabilities, including straight-through processing.
While the total amount invested by superannuation funds on technology in Australia is not tracked, it would comprise a significant proportion of the total $10.8 billion that APRA found funds spent in 2022-23, with 53 percent of that allocated to administration and other expenses.
Digital customer engagement
The desire to improve engagement is represented across a wide variety of superannuation providers, and it is driving a wave of investment that reaches back much further than just customer facing systems.
For the head of accumulation, marketing and digital at Telstra Super, Esme Eterovic, technology is a core enabler of both experience and business efficiency, so the key question is how to ensure it straddles both worlds.
“The frontend experience has to be as good as the backend experience that supports it,” Eterovic said.
“That is the core of our strategy, making sure that we are aligning efficiency and optimisation and scale with the experience expectations that our customers have.”
Whereas ten years ago she says customers might have been happy to wait for their annual statement, todays she says they are now engaging in frequent short interactions.
“Ten years ago, we just need to be the best experience for a super fund and would have been compared to the experiences of our peers,” she said.
“That is not the case anymore. We are compared to anything that they are doing on any given day.”
Eterovic describes the journey as being one from transformation to optimisation to excellence.
“The core of everything is done, but now it is about the last 10 percent, and how we can give tools, features, calculators, personalisation, and experiences that really connect and engage with customers instead of just meeting their expectations,” she said.
“The core investments have been in those digital platforms, but equally we have focused on straight through processing and optimisation of back-end services, so that if someone is submitting something via a digital channel, it can be turned around in real time and their experience of that is end to end, not disjointed over a longer period of time.”
With customers’ expectations constantly rising, Eterovic says the need to keep improving services is relentless.