Welcome to that super show, the podcast where we talk all things super from the inside. I'm Neil Benson, CEO of Superware.

And I'm Sarah Penn, CEO of Mayflower Consulting. Each week we unpack what's changing in the industry, what funds are wrestling with and how tech and regulation are shaping the landscape.

Sometimes we bring in expert guests, but mostly it's just us having a real conversation about how super is working and what could make it even better.

Let's get into.

G', day, Sarah. Welcome back to that Super Show. Well, welcome to that Super Show. This is our first episode. Amazing.

Thank you. Thank you. Hi Neil. I'm very happy to be here. Edition number one, hopefully of many.

Awesome. Well, I've been brushing up on the news affecting superannuation sector recently and as always, there seems to be heaps going on.We're heading into the end of the financial year. It's been a pretty busy time. Obviously we've got the government having been re elected.It looks like Div296 is going to be one of the bills that's going to pass. How do you think it's going to land? Where do you see it going from here?

Well, sadly, I think it's probably going to go through pretty much in the format it is, which is going to drive everyone bananas.

Why do you say that?

Because of the unrealised capital gains tax issue. At a macro level, I think it's perfectly reasonable that people who have extortionate amounts of money in their super can pay a bit of extra tax.I think we'll all live. As always though, the devil is in the detail and trying to figure out how on earth to even calculate it.

There's a couple of contentious components. One is the taxing of unrealized gains.I don't think there's any other part of the Australian economy where the government attempts to tax unrealized gains.Although I did hear somebody say that land tax is a fairly similar kind of tax, but because it's based on the value of the property, I didn't buy that argument. And then the other part is then the non indexing of the $3 million limit. So you know, inflation will eat away at the value of that.And it was going to be the average price of a house someday in the future.

Not far off in Sydney.

Yeah. Is it going to be fair on our kids? Unrealized gain applies to balances of over $3 million.I think there's a long way to go many, many years in the future for a government to make A tweak and say well yeah, we're going to attach the Div 296 limit to the transfer balance cap, for example, so those things stay in lockstep in the future. We never know.

I think that's highly likely.I think it's often the case that when there's new legislation coming in people forget that it will get changed in future by someone else, often the same party, maybe the other party, but it will get updated. I think 3 million is a good place to start and it can always get changed later.

Some people are critical of the number of changes that have been made to the superannuation system over a 30 year lifetime.

But oh yes, I'm happy to join in that party.

Well, you couldn't have designed it perfectly at the outset. It's one of those systems that has evolved over time. We try and find ways of making it fairer to everybody, fairer to the taxpayer.And I read recently that the tax benefits given away by the government through the superannuation system are more than the savings that they would make if they just give everybody the age pension. And it was designed to deflect costs from the age pension.So I think there'll continue to be adjustments made over time to make it fairer for everybody.

Yes, I haven't seen that. You must put a link in the show notes so I will read it too. I have to say I do find it a bit hard to believe.Maybe it was on the calcs of how much money was in the system at the time.If you look at from an international lens we're normally stated to have the third or fourth best system in the world but as you say, it doesn't mean it can't do with fixing.I think it's getting that balance right between when you're on the inside and constantly trying to make all the changes that keep coming at you it gets harder and harder and harder.But as you're right from the outside actually funnily enough there's a couple of graphs which I'm sure we can stick in the show notes one way or another that show that in about 2011 and 12 the people who were benefiting from tax in super were the top 20% of income earners by a huge margin and that has in fact changed significantly. So it is much fairer now than it was before.The funny thing that we've now got actually is I saw the other day people who earn between I think it's $45,000 and $70,000 are penalised by the super system over and above any other group. And that's because people in the lower category get the listo, which is the lower income super tax offset.But the problem is the average household income in Australia now is about 90 or $100,000 a year. So there's an awful lot of people who fit into that 45 to $70,000 bracket and are getting no, no value out of Super.It's right borderline on just sticking it, you know, going to CommSec and buying some ETFs, let's say something sensible instead compared to having it in the super system. So hopefully that'll get fixed soon. But yeah, I'm still happy for the 3 million to go ahead.

And the only downside, I guess of all the changes over time is it erodes people's trust in superannuation and then believing that it's a great place to park their money for their own retirement. And I hate to see that, but I do understand the frequency of the changes leads to that kind of thought process for a lot of people.But they've got to remember that there's changes to the tax system outside of super as well. They're just maybe not as memorable. Changes to land tax and local taxes as well as federal income taxes as well.So the systems are constantly being changed.

Yes. Well, it's very interesting actually the whole argument about framing.When the original tax rate on drawdown is zero, you go to try and change it and all hell breaks loose, which is exactly what has happened. But if you look at, as you say, if you look at like income tax rates, they're changing all the time. They go up, down constantly.Most people potentially tell you what their marginal tax rate is, but they probably couldn't tell you what their actual netted off tax rate is. We all just live with it and have, you know, roads and hospitals and healthcare and get on with it. But yeah, because it starts off at zero.But anyway, that's a whole nother discussion. We can have that for our Big Idea section some other time.

What else has been happening in the news, Sarah? What have you seen coming out of AHPRA or ASIC recently?

Well, speaking of meddling, but trying to make it fairer, let's talk about APRA and their recent missive about all super funds need to have multi factor authentication and get on with it fast. There's two things for me. One, we're already onto passkeys, which means multiple factor authentication is so last year.And secondly, just it's very difficult as it is to ID people And this just adds to the entertainment and the service standards that we're already complaining about.

So I did an analysis of 15 superannuation funds last year and logging into the member online experience and they all bar one and required me to set up Multi Factor Authentication and it was via sms. So it's not perfect, that's slightly vulnerable mechanism, but it's better than just having using a password.But it's interesting that none of them offered the option for an authenticator app which I would have preferred. Although I've since heard a couple of funds do offer that option. They just weren't in the 15 that I tested out.But yeah, you're right, passkeys are even better security protocol that they're just not offered today by I don't think any superannuation fund. I do feel for them though because a lot of members don't join a superannuation fund.They're not signing up themselves through a website where they can set up that Multi Factor authentication. They come through an employer route or some other mechanism.Maybe their financial advisor sets them up within a card and it's tough to identify those people, ID them, put them through KYC, AML and then ask them to set up Multi Factor Authentication. So it's a tough challenge.

Yes, and most of that because super has the exception. So in superannuation you don't have to email people on the way in, you only have to email them on the way out.In the early days of super, when all the money was coming in and none of it was going out, sounded like a great game, but.But now lots of people are retiring and trying to take money out and suddenly you've got lots and lots of baby boomers who we all know there's a big mix of people in any generation in terms of their ability to deal with technology.But when you're really excited about getting some money out of super and and then you find out that you can't get it because you, your boss who set you up in 1996, put in the wrong tax file number and spelled your middle name wrong and now you can't get AML'd and you can't get your money, it all gets a bit entertaining.

Yeah, I'm sure the folks working in member services have a grand old time handling members like that with discrepancies in spelling and identification. It must be horrible.

But yeah, it's very common.

I'm in two minds whether we should do that. Those checks on join or on exit. I think on exit it's probably appropriate.It'd be nice if we had the option as a member to make it easier at the start so I can have the right data, ensure that I'm spelled correctly. And if I choose not to, or if I'm able to do it until later, then we deal with it later.But let's improve the process where we can for the members who can.

Absolutely. Especially for large super funds. So HostPlus is one of the largest super funds.I understand they have about 250,000 new people join the fund each year, where it's the individual person who makes a choice about where they're going to put their super and they join Host Plus. So for all those people, it should be, she says on her high horse, the same as opening a bank account. Just AML on the way in. Right.Anything you can do to reduce the number of people that you have to deal with on the way out where things are going to be wrong. I think it's that thing too. Of as we often do, we think about either it is the way in or it's when they try and get their money out.But obviously a lot of people have the same super account for 20, 30, 40 years. There's lots of opportunities across that time frame to AML them. You know, you could do it by age or how much money they've got.There's a million different ways you could cut it to figure out who to do first. Even people who regularly use the app would be a good.Would be like a good place to start, rather than feeling like you either keep doing what you're doing, which is it's hard, or you swap to doing everyone on the way in, which is a nightmare when the employers are signing people up. How do you even do that?

So if, I guess if anybody out there in superannuation trust land is working on AML improvement or authentication improvements, let us know. We'd love to shout out your good work and share that with other funds so that we can all lift the game.Well, I see the chairman of asic, Joe Longo, is again just rattling the cages with another reminder that he's keeping an eye on everybody. The latest news is that trustee directors have no excuses for not understanding what's going on with member complaints or service failings.Ignorance is no excuse is the message from Chair Joe Longo. The regular is really stepping up the rhetoric at the moment. Yeah. What do you make of the latest missive?

Well, as I say, ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law. The difficulty, however, is how to make sure. As a director, that you're getting the information that you need to be able to look at it.Having said that, I'm the first one to give the regulators a hard time if I think they're overstepping, which is often looking at you DDO and RG97, but in this case, honestly, I know it's hard if you're a director, but it's your job, you're getting paid money, hopefully a reasonable amount of money to be on top of what is going on.And if you're a trustee of a superannuation fund, that is a, that's a really, really important job and it is beholden on people who are directors, trustee directors or non executive directors or any kind of whatever director on ASIC's list to make sure they're well and truly on top of what's happening and to make sure their fund is able to provide the information they need to be able to stay on top of it. I'm a little bit short on sympathy, I've got to say. Doesn't mean it's hard.It's a big job though, and if you don't want a big job, there's lots of other people who want the big job.

Yeah, yep.

Personally, I have no wish to ever be a director on a super fund. It sounds awful.

Oh, I don't know, you get to go to the big conference at the end of the year and hang out with all your big mates and yeah, I think it'd be great.

I'm happy to go to the conference and hang out with my mates drinking martinis, as you and other people well know. But yeah, I can do without that bit. In fact, that actually follows on to another thing.AHPRA has released a consultation paper recently, 5, 10, about governance and in that they are really looking for a step up in the way that directors vetted, the way they behave, the way that funds make sure they have the appropriate levels of education and basics like police checks and things. So it'll be very interesting to see, see what that means. And here's my hot tip for today.If this is the first time you've heard the words CPS 510 and you work in a super fund anywhere near a board, you need to go and read the consultation paper stat and get onto it.Because boards only meet, as we all know, four times a year normally, if you want to start making substantial changes to how your board operates, you need to be getting on that horse sooner rather than later. Even though it comes into force in a couple of years, because two years time is seven or eight board meetings away. Terrifying.

Not a lot of time to turn it around. What do you think the differences are between the expectations of a board member of a superannuation trust and a publicly listed company?Should there be differences in terms of the kind of qualifications they have, the experience, the background checks, or are the two rules kind of equivalent? Looking after a Super fund or looking after a publicly listed company?

Publicly listed. There's a huge amount of constant communication that goes to the market about what's happening with a large listed company.And you have proper AGMs, annual general meetings, which is an opportunity to not approve remuneration. And if you really want to go there, to organise a motion to remove a board member.So there's things in place, none of that exists in super and at the same time super is part of our social licence, or the social licence to operate issue, because they're supposed to be acting in the best interest of their members to save for retirement. I think if you are a board member on a super fund, you should actually be held to a higher standard than that of a board member of a listed company.And while on paper I actually have no idea if you are or not, you might be, the reality of the situation is public listed board members get dragged, get dragged through the mud much more easily than Superfund members do. We have some stuff now that's disclosure on websites about how often board members turn up to meetings and REM and other things.I guess for me it's two things. One is public pressure to behave appropriately.The other is internal expectation of yourself and what that means and board members of, well, a public listed company as well. It's a stewardship role. There's a lot of people who've come before you. There's a lot of money hopefully in the bank to keep doing what you're doing.Obviously there's a lot of members money. Even if you're a tiny fund and you only have $2 billion, that is $2 billion of someone else's money that you are looking after.And so I think that concept of stewardship and making sure that your fund still exists or is able to still exist in 20, 40 years is what you should be thinking about primarily as a board member and what you need to make sure that continues to happen. So much more there is to say, but we'll do it a different time.

The call to action there is go and check out CPS 510 on the upper website consultation paper about the stewardship expected from our Our directors. Awesome.

Indeed.

I saw another little ASIC one. This one sounded really nitpicky to me.Was there was an ongoing advice fee arrangement between a member and the advisor inside a Super fund and the agreement didn't specify the member's account number. The member must have had more than one account and maybe the wrong account got debited.The ongoing advice fee and ASIC pulled up the fund and said that was not acceptable. What. That's a very.It seems like a very minor issue, but what do you make of the whole ongoing advice fees, particularly for members inside our large open offer funds.

I'm perfectly happy for ongoing advice fees to be taken out of super as long as they're reasonable and funds are supposed to have and check limits and check that the money that's coming out and getting paid to the adviser is reasonable. Now, as to what reasonable is, of course that is very entertaining.Other discussion ASIC nitpicking about someone missing an account number on a form. I have to say it's a significant eye roll from me. There are so many bigger fish to fry that is not high up on my list of issues.I think the quantum of advice fees is easily a much bigger issue than whether or not someone filled out the paperwork properly. It's issues like that that just. That's when I think people get annoyed with super as a system. When you see things like that.

Okay, so astecs may be doing their job and you could say that that kind of surveillance is a necessary part of the regulator' but making that public, really, I don't understand.

Yeah, yeah. The public side of it, like, oh, come on, guys. Like really, they need a press release.

Ongoing advice. Then we talk about F296 coming in as a new bill.The enactment of the reforms from the Levy Review into superannuation and advice seems to be dragging tails. Nothing happened in Labour's first term, the first three years. The Levy Review, I think was published shortly after they took government.We've seen very little action of its implementation. Do you think it's going to happen? Do you think advice is going to change for the better anytime soon?

I think it will happen, actually. I really do think it will happen because there was actually bipartisan support for nearly everything, everything in the Levy report.Michelle Levy is a very wise woman. I think the government's thing about how they couldn't.Stephen Jones publicly said at an ASFA conference and I know he said it because I was the one who asked the question because I'm a shit steerer was like when is this going to get. When's the second trench? When's the rest of this, you know, going to get implemented?And he said that they were looking to have it as a single piece of legislation, which to me sounded like a stupid idea because you're trying to get six things through in one bucket, which is always going to be hard.And secondly, he said that the reason they hadn't done it was there weren't enough people to write the legislation which is right in the same bucket as we can't offer good administration to our super members because we don't have enough people to do it. Well, I'm sorry mate. Find a different way. Yeah, but I think they will get it through the things in it.Getting rid of the statement of advice, although what that's replaced with will probably end up being just as painful if you're an adviser, I suspect the nudging thing so that you can help people make better decisions without it falling into personal advice I think is fantastic. Cannot come soon enough.

Yep, agree with you.

I think everyone's in agreement on or nearly everyone's in agreement on that. But yeah, as to when it's going to happen, I'd like to say soon. Team. Hello Beulah.

I have a few reservations about this. I can't remember what the Levy report referred to as like a part qualified financial advisor.So you know, they're not as educated and certified as the current standards we expect of professional financial advisors and they're able to provide a little bit more than general advice. It's maybe limited personal financial advice on a single topic.I can't remember the name of the qualification but yeah, it just sounds a little bit open to abuse and you know, are we going to see banks and all these other financial services organizations pile back into financial advice after exiting the market a few years ago? We'll see.

Yeah, I hope not and I hope that doesn't go anywhere is the short version.It'll be like there was an exception for accountants for a number of years to have to be able to offer limited advice around self managed super funds. Lots of accountants went through the process of getting that licence. Nobody used it. It was or hardly anyone.It was an administrative overhead, total pain in the ass and has since quietly disappeared from view.And I think this could likely go the same way because actually the, the nudging side of things will hopefully, hopefully the combination of that plus not needing to do, you know, a full statement of advice every time you clap eyes on a client, both of those should hopefully get rid of the need to have this sort of half assed in between version, which, as you say, is just an opportunity for arbitrage.And we're in financial services and if we can, financial services people are bloody good at finding an arbitrage and often that is about making the company more money than it is, more about that than it is about, you know, helping people retire. Well, so, yeah, I'm with you. Hopefully that goes nowhere.

Yeah, well, anything we do, I think we have hundreds of thousands of people retiring every year in Australia and only 15,000 advisors serving them. That leaves huge cohorts of people without any ability access financial advice for a reasonable price.Yeah, anything we could do to improve that situation would be good. And you mentioned some stats about how many financial advisors we had in Australia compared to the uk and I find that really interesting.Can you refresh?

Yes. So in the UK, last time I checked, there's about 80 million people live there compared to our 28 million.And they have about 20,000 financial planners and we have 15,000. So that's 20,000 compared to 80 million. And we have 15,000 compared to 28 million.So as you can see, statistically there's where someone's way off the mark, which is one of the things that makes me think, I don't think we need loads and loads more full financial advisers. And it has flatlined the number of financial advisers that we have. So it's pretty stable now.So we're sort of, you know, the new normal is coming into place. And look, there's issues with that, but none of them are insurmountable.I think the issue is that the average punter doesn't want and will never want to pay 5,000 bucks for advice. And so we just have to have some other way of helping those people, which puts us closer to what it would be like in the UK in terms of ratios.Yeah, absolutely.

I've been mulling a lot recently about trying to help superannuation funds make the business case for technology investments. We have the same issue with some of the public sector organizations we deal with and I feel for them both because.

I'm very sorry, Neil.

They're very keen to make investments in technology, but they're spending other people's money. In the case of superannuation, it's members money, in the case of government departments, it's taxpayers money.And they have to be very cautious about how they go about making those investments, making sure there's a good return, whereas we see private companies taking a few more risks, running A few more experiments, running a proof of concept or a prototype or something before making a full blown investment in it. It strikes me as a great opportunity for some of our funds to take a stand and go.We want to be best known for an amazing mobile app or amazing member online experience, rather than the continuous focus on driving down fees and focusing on performance, which are very important. But the closer your fees get to zero, the worse level of service you can provide.And in many cases it means maybe the member's not so badly affected, but their loved ones.When the member passes and has a death benefits claim and it's one of 5,000 in a backlog, that's when those fees really come into play because you can't afford to run the service.

Yeah, look, I think this is such an interesting area and it permeates right through the whole organization, actually.So speaking back to my previous rant about boards, if you're on a board, you're unlikely in the current environment to end up in trouble for not approving a spend. Right? Where you get into trouble and we've seen it, is where the powers that be, I mean, look at the cost of implementing BT Panorama, for instance.We all know the numbers there and they've got way too many zeros on them. So when you go to the board and say, I want X million dollars to do, do the thing, when the board says, well, what are we going to get for it?You say, oh, well, we're hoping to get blahdy blahdy blah.And if it's on the risk and compliance or member service, which doesn't make you any more money per se, then the, you know, five year net present value is very, very hard to calculate and it makes it very difficult for boards or senior executives to say yes to things. So that I think is one of the key issues and then that permeates the whole sort of weigh down the organisation.The second issue which I find very interesting is the Python swallowing the pig issue, which is how much change can an organisation deal with at once? And I do find that can be quite different between different sectors in the industry.And so I'm just going to say it, industry super funds often don't have as many sort of big strategic projects on the go at once as you would find in a retail platform. And it's all super, a lot of it super.And so that ability and that, I guess, maturity of the sort of PMO function and all those things, to be able to make a lot of changes at once. And having worked at Macquarie, where we were at the point where we couldn't make any more changes at once.And that was because there was actually we were getting to the point where there were going to be multiple projects working on the same piece of code at the back end because we were making so many changes at once. That's the other end of the spectrum, right? Where you're actually being. Being stopped by the sheer.The amount of code versus people trying to do something to it.But that thing of being able to how many changes can you make at once and being able to slowly increase that I think is something that's really worth funds looking at. And then I think there's just that whole interesting thing about how to get a business case signed off internally, which is basically a sales job.You can call it whatever you like, but I call it sales or managing up. It's really hard yards to do that and takes a lot of working around the organization and getting lots of people on board. What have you found helps?

Well, the business case is an interesting one because a lot of the most successful customer experience transformations I've worked in there hasn't been a black and white business case full of numbers and payback periods and return on investment and increased revenues. Quite often there's a bit of cost saving element, people more efficient and that kind of thing.But it's the strongly held belief by one or more executives that this is the best thing to do as a strategic lever to expand our market share, improve our customer satisfaction.It's those kind of beliefs, a gut feel that has powered a lot of successful transformation rather than a black and white business case which is trying to convince people who are otherwise very skeptical.I think business cases are still important and they still have a place and you still need to know whether you're on track and whether you're returning to your shareholders or to your members in this case.But yeah, I'd love to see more board members with a conviction that these kinds of investments and you can do small scale experiments rather than bet the farm on a big huge transformation. I love your point about improving the muscle and capability for change.Investing in better project management, change management capabilities, internal change and communication so that we can deal with more change at once. Because the change in regulation isn't slowing down. The competitive landscape isn't slowing down either.Everybody's going to need to improve and get better at coping and adapting to change.

I mean maybe that's the. Maybe that's almost the meta issue, right. Is the. And we do see it all the time, right.That the Amount of change that's coming down the pipe from all the regulators, plus just consumer expectations never ceases to go, never goes down, it always goes up. So you've got just this avalanche of stuff coming.And then maybe it is that broader question about how do you change an organisation so that it is more able to adapt and change more quickly. And of course, when we say organisation, we just mean people, right?

Yes. The sum of people is called organisation.

That's right, yeah. I don't know.I listened to a great podcast the other day, actually, the HBR Women at Work podcast, and they were talking about managing up and someone's written a book about how to manage up, which I have to say I was always terrible at. Apologies to anyone I ever reported to, ever. I have never been very good at it. Other people, some people are absolute experts. I'm not one of them.

But that's why you run your own business today.

Yep. That is 100% correct.I think now that I have, you know, on the one hand I say I don't have a boss, but on the other hand we have lots of clients and that's kind of the same thing, except there's lots of them. Not one. Yeah, managing.Managing all those people and their expectations and making sure we're all on track and, and seeing the bigger picture as well as the smaller picture and all that sort of stuff. I just, I think there's. There's lots, there's still lots of upside to be had on that front, I've got to say. Anyway, we'll.I'll put a link to this podcast. It's called Women at Work. You don't have to be a woman to. To listen to it.She and the girl who was talk woman who was talking about managing up, she had some really useful ideas and tips and things actually about how to. How to do it. It wasn't just, you know, big picture y stuff. It was. I would send an email and I would say this, this and this.

Okay. I love those kind of practical tips as well. Maybe you can put into action and try them on.

Yes.

What kind of events have you got coming up, Sarah? Moving on to some of the other things. We've got a few things in the calendar. I think you're. Next week you're going to be judging at an event.I don't know if people are going to get a chance to listen to this and then register and attend, but tell me what the event year is that you're judging and what that experiences like.

Yes, it's the Money Manager Management. Sorry, Fund Manager of the year. It's number 37. I'm just looking at my notes. Yes, I've been, I've been a. A judge for a couple of years now.Anyway, the awards night is next week, but I just wanted to say that it's so interesting getting to see the different applications that people make.And if you have ever thought about putting your hand up for one of these awards, I would so encourage you to do it because there's always, it's always very random, actually, as to how many people apply for what category really. Sometimes there's only two or three. Two or three people. Right.And so, you know, if you put in a good application, you might actually win the damn thing.And, and if you know someone who's done something really great, then I think it's really, it's really worth putting someone forward for it and it's great for your own sort of personal development.And when it comes to annual review time as well, to be able to say that I got this award or just to actually go through the process and think about, you know, what was the case before, what did I achieve, what did I do to get there?I think it's worth doing just that thing of sometimes stopping from looking at the massive to do list which we all have in front of us, and putting your head up and thinking about it. But yeah, it's so fantastic to read the really interesting things that people have done.I'm not the only judge, of course, get to have a say in who wins. So, yeah, next time you see one of these come along, put your hand up.

What else have you got coming up in the calendar other than your more sensible things?

The event that I just wanted to touch on was the IBR Conference's annual Future Risks conference, which is the 9th and 10th of July, so whatever that is. Three weeks away, I'm going to be hosting a panel about governance.But these IBR conferences are really great, actually, and they're, they're smaller, so you might only have 150, 200 people in the room, but it means the conversations are much more interesting and people are open and they talk about what's going on.And yeah, I've got some really great people coming along for that particular panel, but just that opportunity to get out there and talk to other people who do the same job as you. Prior to starting my own company, all I ever. The only people I ever spoke to was the other people in my own business.And when you do that, it's just insular Right. You just hear the same stories from the same people about the same things all the time.And then you read things in newsletters and you know, when what's happened, but nothing. There's no substitute for actually getting out and talking to real live bodies.

I really enjoy the Iberia events. I think, like, I do find them quite intimate.Some of the ones I've been to have been, you know, 60, 70 people there and getting to meet other consultants, getting to meet, meet people in the industry.You know, the serendipitous conversations you have over lunch with a stranger you just met a few minutes ago or have a drink at the bar in the evening. Just really valuable to share those kind of stories and get to learn and meet other people.So, yeah, if people have an opportunity to register for a Risk Forum or any of the other events coming up in the calendar, then grasp it, go for it.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I was at the Super Admin Conference a month or two ago and one of the things I love about going to these conferences is just getting new ideas.And I wrote down a whole page of new ideas, which I have of course since used to torture my team with. Cause that's your job when you're an entrepreneur.But yeah, there were just some really great ideas out of it that have changed how I'm thinking about things as well.In fact, one of the things that I wrote down from the last conference was this idea of thinking about what question it is that you're asking and it comes back a bit to what we were just talking before about getting business cases up to do new and exciting things and taking bets and how do you move an organisation forward and get more change and just that thing of thinking about, you know, rather, what's the question that you're asking? If someone is putting forward a business case to boil the ocean?Rather than the question being do we approve or not approve this enormous business case, what other questions could you be asking about? Is there a way we can take some small bets and test and learn? Are there other ways to get this project done?Or if we go back three steps, what is it that we're actually trying to achieve? Is this project even the right way to get this thing done? Are we looking at how we're spending money? Are we taking that stewardship approach?Lots of different ways you can come at things, but yeah, asking great questions. That was one of my big things. That was a really good, I would say, reminder, but I'm a bit rubbish at asking questions, so I'd say idea for me.

I come away with lots of of issues and ideas to torture my team with as well.From that last super Admin conference, I came away with lots of ideas for infusing our products with AI and yeah, the development team are busy enacting some of those. So, yeah, I wouldn't have had those ideas if I hadn't met some of the folks at those conferences. So good chance to get out there and expand mine.

Yes, I couldn't agree. We won't improve as an industry if we all just sit at our own desks doing our own thing with no input from anyone else.

Sarah, it's been a great show. Lovely to catch up with you. What else can people expect from that super show coming up over the next two weeks and months? What have we got planned?

Oh, well, we're going to definitely talk about other events and things that are coming up.I have no doubt that our erstwhile mates at the government and the regulators will continue to lob hand grenades over the parapet at every available opportunity.I am also doing some work at the moment just looking at the statistics around retirement and super funds and where all the money is and what's changing because I did some work in 2022 on that, so I will have that to talk about. How about you, Neil? What's coming up in your world?

Well, I'd love to invite some more guests onto the show and begin to get some big ideas from people in the industry. So if there's a topic that you're special on, you'd love to come join us, then reach out to Sarah or myself.We'd love to have you join us on the show. Can I ask you to hold me accountable for something I've recently embarked upon, Sarah?

Indeed. I have the pen at the ready.

Okay. I have signed up with ASFA for my RG146 Super. So I am going to give you a progress update until I have achieved my 146.I'll let you know how that goes.I'm doing the online course, so I'm hoping to do a few hours a week and yeah, just round out my knowledge of the sector and all the regulations and laws and ways of working that apply. And yeah, please check in on me, make sure I'm making some progress.

Oh, I will. That is excellent. I look forward to it.

Awesome. Until then, thanks very much. See you soon.

Thank you. See you soon.

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