Neil Benson00:00:02

Welcome to that super show, the podcast. We talk about all things super from the inside. I'm Neil Benson, founder of Novagentic.

Sarah Penn00:00:10

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.

Neil Benson00:00:19

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.

Sarah Penn00:00:27

Let's get into. Hi, Neil, how are you going?

Neil Benson00:00:34

Great. I have had the best two days of the week.

Sarah Penn00:00:37

Me too. It has been a really fantastic couple of days at the IBRC Future of Member Engagement Comms and Experience Forum.The inaugural one, it was the very first one.

Neil Benson00:00:49

I'm just calling it Engage 2025.

Sarah Penn00:00:51

Yeah, that's kind of what we're doing too.

Neil Benson00:00:53

It was a great event. Much more intimate than the big ASFA conference from last week.What do we have, 60, 70 people over the course of two days, lots of communic marketing member engagement specialists coming to find out some great ideas. It was wonderful.

Sarah Penn00:01:10

Yeah, it's been really fantastic. And a big shout out to Stephen Huppert who put together the program.Unfortunately he couldn't be here, but yeah, he's put together an amazing program. It has been a really fantastic couple of days.We started out with Alana Devitt from Core Data, sort of setting the scene with where consumers are up to. She had some unbelievable stats. 11% Of pre retirees have heard from their fund.Well, putting that the other way for those at the back, 89% of pre retirees have not heard from their fund. Oh my God, people,.

Neil Benson00:01:51

I think there's a concern that we over communicate and that if we send too many messages, people will tune out, unsubscribe, get packed off. And the reality is that we're just not hearing enough.

Sarah Penn00:02:03

It's such BS over communicate the way most funds over communicate. God love you all. So my super fund, I get confirmation that my money's gone in each quarter when Mayflower pays it, which is, you know me.I get an email when there's an annual statement, which is once or I think it's just once a year now. And I get an invite to the amm.

Neil Benson00:02:27

Oh, I know, exciting.

Sarah Penn00:02:30

That's an annual member meeting for those who don't know. So the, like this sort of idea that maybe we're over communicating with people is just. It's just bizarre.I don't quite know where we've come up with that.

Neil Benson00:02:45

So while we Learned lots over the last two days about how to get better data, how to collect better data about our members so that we can communicate more appropriately, you know, understand what life stage they're at, bit more about their psychographics as well as their demographics, what their preferences are and then to communicate more appropriately. But the one thing I hammered home in a lot of sessions was just communicate much more often.

Sarah Penn00:03:05

Yes.

Neil Benson00:03:06

And give members a way of providing feedback to say they like that communication, they want more of that, less of that. Yeah, that was great.

Sarah Penn00:03:12

Yes.I thought there's a great quote from Duncan McPherson who said, the moment of uncertainty where confidence is tested, communication matters as much as investment strategy. And I just, I think that's so true.There was lots of discussion about all this amazing personalisation and things we can do, but since most funds don't even have a monthly newsletter, I feel like there's a picture of a mountain in someone's presentation. We're still at the bottom of the mountain, but that shouldn't stop you from hiking to base camp is what I'd say.

Emma Jonceski00:03:49

My name is Emma John Seski. I am the advisor proposition lead at Aware Super.And that means my role is to think about how advisors interact with a fund and look at that end to end experience and make it better for advisors and the members that they serve.

Neil Benson00:04:01

I wanted to ask Emma, what's the biggest misconception you think you've done a lot of work with members, what's the biggest misconception members have about superannuation?

Emma Jonceski00:04:09

I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that our younger members don't necessarily realise that it's their money and that they have choices that they can make. There are actions that they can take so that they can improve their retirement outcomes.I think young members don't necessarily think about retirement rightly so they've got a lot of things going on or if they're in the boat like I am, young kids, big mortgage, all those kinds of things, but they don't engage to the point that they don't even realise what's going on and the choices that they can have.So things like their risk profile, their insurance, but also what type of investments they have and if they have strong views on whether or not they should be invested in certain industries, that they can make choices about those kinds of things.

Neil Benson00:04:48

So whose responsibility is it to help members move past those misconceptions? Is it something we should be doing at school? Is it the parents responsibility? Is it their employer or their super.

Emma Jonceski00:04:57

Fund or combination I think everybody has a role to play. I think you touched on education and I think there's necessarily an opportunity for us to think more about financial literacy in schools.I also think there is a responsibility on the individual. At some point it is your money and you have to make decisions and we can't force people to manage their budget and their life.But I think there is definitely a role for superannuation funds to be playing in this space and for superannuation funds to be thinking about how do they better engage members, how do they get them to understand what they can do, what their options are and the impacts that has on retirement.

Neil Benson00:05:33

We're learning lots at the Engage event about member communications, how to engage them.And what we're learning is that there's a massive amount of under communication and there's a great opportunity for us all to communicate more frequently to the members, educate them at more touch points along the way. So hopefully we can put that into action as we move forward.

Emma Jonceski00:05:49

Yeah, absolutely.

Neil Benson00:05:50

Thanks so much. Think about this week. ASX is down a couple of percent, I think, over the week, and we're getting some rockiness in interest rate expectations.And what's happening with the AI bubble? How many funds do you think have communicated this week to the members about the situation? And just to calm the nerves and.

Sarah Penn00:06:10

Reassure people, I'd say between none and maybe one. I don't know who the one is, but I'm saying maybe one did because that would be really mean if I said absolutely none of them.But honestly, I don't think many have at all. And we had today we had a panel of members. Oh my God, real customers of real funds.And I specifically invited three people who are experts in their own fields, who are very bright, intelligent people, to talk about their experiences with Super. And one of them, she's 61, she was saying her fund has just not contacted her at all. And she is highly engaged.She gets the unit price every single day.

Neil Benson00:07:07

She wanted a daily unit price email. She wanted to know exactly which companies every single investment was invested in. Yep, yeah, that's engaged.

Sarah Penn00:07:14

Yeah, it is so engaged. And the interesting thing for me, out of that, and the three of them on the panel were like, oh, no, we don't know where.Well, Ed did, but the other two didn't. We don't know where our money is because they're both in big funds.It is available on the website, but it hasn't been given to them in a way that is easily digestible or put straight in front of them or brought to their attention. I think we tend to rely on websites too much. We sort of go, oh, well, it's on the website. It's like saying, oh, it's on the.In the fourth aisle in the bottom shelf at Coles. It doesn't mean anyone's ever seen it.

Neil Benson00:07:49

Great. If I was invested in a particular investment option or go to that web page for that investment option, I can subscribe to any changes.So you know I'm in the high growth option. Let me know more about the high growth option. Send me a monthly newsletter about it when you know the Fang the Magnificent Seven are up or down or.Or the Chief Investment Officer has switched out of this or into that. It'd be good to know.

Sarah Penn00:08:12

Yes, it would be. And it's not that hard. And also that sort of information is provided by asset consultants and everyone else to Super Funds very regularly anyway.So it's not like the information isn't there. It's a matter of collating it and sending it out.

Kathy Duncan00:08:28

Kathy Duncan I'm a senior consultant at tcs. I've been there for about four years.So having been a business person working in technology and innovation and engagement sort of stuff is interesting now, an organization.

Neil Benson00:08:40

Of TCS at scale. You must have seen lots of AI and innovation been introduced into the superannuation sector this year. Any highlights for you?

Kathy Duncan00:08:47

Yeah, absolutely. Look, everyone's talking about it. I have heard AI equated to teenage sex. Lots of people talk about it. No one's actually doing it.I think we're slowly progressing past that point. What I think is interesting is where people are picking on kind of problem solving.Use cases, not really using AI because they can, but figuring out something's really annoying me in our processes, something's really annoying our customers or advisors in our processes and you actually focus on the problem and figure out how you can make that faster and better. So one client we've worked with particularly, we took three use cases.I think they're using two of them now, but I think the third one was a bit harder to implement. So it's going to take a bit more time.So it was actually saying how can you make something that's painful for a customer, like changing their personal details really easy.Using AI and using voice innovation, I think that's going to take a little bit longer because obviously there's risks associated that you want to make sure you're very comfortable with before you do it.But the other ones were really about how to make an advisor's life a bit easier with Processing forms and giving them AI related feedback to actually say, this is where the form's not quite right. I need you to check this off. Can you do that now? Yes, I can do it now. And away it goes.So you effectively gave them a dashboard of tasks, which I think is a really interesting way to evolve how you interact with advisors. So there's some interesting ones that we've been working on. I think there's thousands out there.But my encouragement would be look at what annoys your clients or advisors or customers or what takes them the most time and do something really useful.

Neil Benson00:10:21

Great.

Neil Benson00:10:22

Thanks, Cathy. I really appreciate your insights.

Kathy Duncan00:10:24

No worries. Thanks.

Sarah Penn00:10:27

I have this thing that I like to talk about which is lazy marketing. And when I say lazy marketing, I don't mean lazy as in doing a rubbish job.I mean, what I actually mean is making sure you capitalise on the things that you do do. So there's been this concept in marketing for a long time about assets and return on making sure you get a good return on the assets.So the asset might be a webinar.And the people on the panel talked about the fact that they did occasionally see that their fund was running a webinar, but it didn't suit them to go to it and there was no opportunity, or at least it wasn't put in front of them to go and watch it later.

Neil Benson00:11:08

Does your Fund have a YouTube channel with all those webinars available at my convenience?

Sarah Penn00:11:14

Yes. And some of them do, but they don't stick it in front of people and go, here you go.And I know when we run webinars, when Mayflower or Crew or ASPA does, we send lots of reminders beforehand and then we send follow up emails afterwards with key takeouts, links to video where you can see it, blah, blah, blah.And not only is that much better for the person who may or may not have been able to attend to watch it, but it's also much better for Mayflower because it gets us loads of opportunities to go and talk to our clients. And.And I think this sort of idea is just the funds often miss the thing and so when they do put a lot of effort into sending something out, it's often like a send a significant event notice because they have to send it and there is a huge amount of effort that goes into it because God help you if it's wrong. It's like a pds, but there's no. They only send it once. It's often sent in a. The email that goes with it is quite perfunctory.So you might not realise that it was something, that there's something in it that you should really read that sort of thing. There's lots of opportunities to do more with the stuff we've already got.

Neil Benson00:12:20

I received one of those recently from my fund who said we're closing down one of our pooled investment options. If you liked it. Sorry, tough. And I understand they can't. They probably will swap my allocation into another investment option.They've obviously made that decision already. But they didn't make it easy for me to choose something else.

Neil Benson00:12:40

Right.

Neil Benson00:12:41

So, um, it's up to me to now to take action, dig through it, find out if there's another option that's similar to that one that I could choose instead. You know, just a moment of inconvenience and they didn't really recognize that in that communication.Yeah, there's lots, we have heard lots of stories like that over the past couple days.

Sarah Penn00:12:58

We have. There's been an awful lot of, I guess easy ways to do things much better.

Neil Benson00:13:05

Yeah. And there's lots of great examples of best practice and amazing moments of truth and convenience and everything else shared as well.

Daniel McKean00:13:16

My name's Dan McKean, I'm the CEO and founder of Chandler CX. We're a customer experience company helping organizations that have a high need for data security and a low tolerance for anything going wrong.

Neil Benson00:13:30

So, Dan, we're wrapping up here at Engage 2025. How have you found it?

Daniel McKean00:13:33

Oh, really good. A lot of good content. Yeah. Enjoyed the conversation. It's been fantastic.

Neil Benson00:13:38

We had a privilege of sharing the panel stage together today, so this is going to be a great question for you.I wanted to get your experience on one thing superannuation funds could do today to dramatically improve the member outcomes that their members are going to experience.

Daniel McKean00:13:53

I think there's no doubt that there are vast opportunities and low hanging fruit for super funds to improve member engagement with things such as digital forms and interactive statements. And really looking at how do they remove friction from the member experience and streamline those workflow processes at the back end.So automation of workflow, removing friction from the front end, that's what everyone wants to do. Maybe easier said than done, but the one thing would be look at some practical opportunities to act now.So have you got PDF forms or PDF documents that are going out? Are they high friction and what options could be better options? And there are plenty available today.

Neil Benson00:14:40

Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

Daniel McKean00:14:43

Pleasure.

Neil Benson00:14:46

I love.John Burke from Kudo shared an example of an onboarding Video of a fund, how a fund could take a photograph of a member and ask a member in their app or in their website to upload their personal photograph and ask them to say their name. And from that he could generate a video of himself aged 75 giving himself.

Sarah Penn00:15:09

It was old John talking, young John.

Neil Benson00:15:10

Talking to the new member John saying, you can make a personal contribution, 50 bucks a week now will make a massive difference to your retirement. And because it was him looking like a 75 year old gentleman and sounding like him as well, sounded like him was really compelling.

Sarah Penn00:15:26

Yes, it was very impressive and actually pretty straightforward to do.I think for me it's that combination of not just focusing, like if you want to improve these things in your fund, it is that kind of you need to improve across the portfolio of things that you do.So I do think more funds could do a monthly email out to members and I used to say that this was a terrible idea because you don't want old people getting stuff about buying your home and you don't want young people getting stuff about retirement.But I have to say where I'm at now is so long as you've got a couple of different articles and there might be something in there that's of interest, I don't care anymore.Please just start sending out much more regular communications and getting in front of people and making it easier for them to find the stuff that might be useful to them.So I think like the absolute basics like that and then at the other end there's new things that you can do with AI and personalisation and ageing and everything to really bring home the fact that future you will like you now you much better if you, you know, stop getting Uber eats quite so often and put a bit of extra money into your super instead.

Neil Benson00:16:37

That was really clever.

Alana Devitt00:16:40

My name is Alana Davit, I'm a research consultant here at Cordata and I head up our superannuation and our retirement research.

Sarah Penn00:16:47

Welcome to the IBRC Member Engagement Conference. My question for you is what's the one thing that that funds could be doing to dramatically improve their member outcomes?

Alana Devitt00:16:57

Ultimately our research has really shown that retirement is a lot more complex than it used to be a few years ago and there's a lot more people in the system now moving through. So there's a big job done for the funds to help move members through their retirement in this complex environment.And ultimately we know that there is a supply gap with financial advice and the regulator and members are starting to really look to funds to fill in that gap.So the one thing funds could really do to help dramatically improve their member outcomes is start that education process probably a lot sooner than they think. You know, we doubt people start thinking about retirement at about 50 and the early ones as early as 45.So it's making sure that once they start to engage with their fund, that that glide path for education happens and they're able to move through the system a lot more easier than they are at right now.

Sarah Penn00:17:47

Fantastic.

Sarah Penn00:17:48

And education's not advice, so there's nothing stopping them doing it right now.

Alana Devitt00:17:52

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And it starts, really, the simple things.The concern is when they're younger and it's saving and budgeting tips, and it's just starting to think about contributions and salary sacrificing. It's those little things.If you get them earlier on, you start educating them on that, that then by the time they get to the age where they're starting to plan, it's just a lot more of a similar process.

Sarah Penn00:18:12

Excellent. Thank you so much, Alana.

Sarah Penn00:18:14

Have a great conference.

Alana Devitt00:18:14

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Neil Benson00:18:19

I got a great opportunity to showcase some work that I've been doing building administrative agents for superannuation funds.I have this goal of stripping all the $34 billion in fees that we spend as members in investment fees and admin fees for superannuation funds, stripping a lot of that cost out so we can spend more money on better communications, on better advice, on better products, and maybe reducing some of the fees as well.Novagentic is the new venture I'm launching to be able to do that and just showing, for example, an early access claim and how we can use an agent to automate all of that process.I got so many people commenting on my jokes about PDF forms, and we have this love affair with a portable document format and superannuation, and we think that publishing a PDF form in the website is digital transformation and you don't have to fill in a bit of paper. Fill in a PDF and say, it's.

Sarah Penn00:19:06

Like, we don't have bits of paper anymore, but we're very attached to our bits of paper. So what we'll do is we'll produce a digital bit of paper and. And then now we're done.Digital transformation, it's like, no, mate, it's still a digital bit of paper. We don't want the bit of paper at all.

Neil Benson00:19:17

Yeah.We still have to get somebody and an administration team to pick it up and type it into the workflow system and process it and give the member a result. A Week or two later.

Sarah Penn00:19:25

Yes. We used to talk about STP not being straight through processing but instead being straight to printer.

Zoe Sheehan00:19:31

Yes.

Sarah Penn00:19:32

Still like I'd like to say that's better than it was but maybe I did like what you did with the early access claim.So what Neil had the, had the AI agent do is pull the information out of the letter that you get from the ATO and then do the checks in the background and then serve up the information back to the person to be able to pay out the money, assuming AML has been done and adding in AML if you need it to ID the person so you could pay them out the money straight away. And all that could be done basically in a matter of seconds. Whereas in the past it would be weeks potentially.When I say in the past, now it's probably weeks.And if you are at the point when you've gone to the ATO to get the give me my I need money because I'm desperate point, then you're probably not going to want to be waiting weeks. You probably need it right now.

Neil Benson00:20:21

Absolutely.So yeah, it's just a simple example of what we can do to really digitize a process and deliver a better member experience and reduce our fees and, and reduce our cost at the same time.

Sarah Penn00:20:31

Yeah, that was heaps of fun. Yeah, totally approve. What else do we have today? Oh, we had a fun for everyone who was here at the end today.We had a off book session because the last speaker unfortunately couldn't make it. Instead we had four tables of people and each table chose their own new pretend super fund. So we had a neurospicy super fund. Spicy Super.We had a fund just for post retirees which is called Retire now.We had one for the ultra High Net worth which is called Ultra High Net Worth super, which I thought was a functional name would be how you describe it through marketing. And then we had super for sort of the 15 to 20 year olds which I don't think ever got a name.

Neil Benson00:21:13

I thought it was Zed Super.

Sarah Penn00:21:14

Oh, Zed Super. That's right. Zed Super.

Neil Benson00:21:16

Yeah, the Ultra High Net Worth Super. I'm just wondering why they don't have a family office already. Their members all had Learjets and helicopters and like wow.

Neil Benson00:21:26

Really?

Sarah Penn00:21:27

I like the concierge idea though.

Neil Benson00:21:29

Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Penn00:21:29

I think the interesting thing for me out of that. So what we did was we got each of the groups think about their sort of Persona and avatar for their fund and then do a 12 week onboarding process.And the interesting thing for me was across all four different groups, even though they are very different cohorts with very different Personas, life stages, amount of money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The onboarding actually looked very similar.

Neil Benson00:21:56

Yeah.

Sarah Penn00:21:57

And that was one of my key things that I, I don't think I said out loud to everyone at the end, but I hoped everyone kind of took away, which is that we can do a lot with what we've got now. And also nothing anyone was suggesting would fall foul of the personal advice laws. It was all things that are perfectly possible right now.

Zoe Sheehan00:22:20

My name's Zoe Sheehan, I work at how. I'm an innovation and proposition manager.

Neil Benson00:22:25

Zoe, we've just wrapped up engaged 2025. How was it?

Zoe Sheehan00:22:28

It was amazing. There was plenty of good insights that I took away from that and also invented a new super fund for neurospicy people. So that was really fun.

Neil Benson00:22:40

We talked a lot over the last couple of days about members and looking into the future. How do you think the way that Australians retire is going to change between today 2025 and let's say 15 years in the future? In 2040?

Zoe Sheehan00:22:51

I think it's going to change significantly.I think younger generations are starting to understand the importance of super and looking at it in a different perspective, people are going to view their super as something that old people have, which is what they currently look at it. They're going to see it as an investment and you can set up investment plans. So I think looking at it as an investment is going to help.And also in terms of retirement, I think that that's going to switch to more being reborn or rebirthed. So retirement shouldn't be something that, you know, you become retired when you're old and you can't actually enjoy your money.Retirement is something that's going to happen when people are younger and then they've got longer lives. So retirement is actually the time that people are born and they can start using their money.

Neil Benson00:23:41

Yeah, I love that idea. I love the idea of just instead of stopping doing a full time job and then tomorrow I'm retired, no more work.We're going to have this opportunity to have another career and it's going to be, you know, part time work funded by my superannuation, my other investments as well. Fantastic.

Zoe Sheehan00:23:55

Exactly. And even portfolio careers on the rise. I think when people ask me, when do you want to retire?For me I would want to work for a long time because I like what I do. So retirement isn't something that I'm like, oh my God, I want to retire because I actually enjoy my work.So I think that if you've got a portfolio, career and remote work, you can actually travel the world and work as well. So I think that some people might not even want to ever retire. Yes.

Neil Benson00:24:21

Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us.

Zoe Sheehan00:24:22

That's okay. Thank you.

Neil Benson00:24:26

I've got a shout out to Zoe Sheehan who was on my team. She's from tal. She come up with the best ideas for building this digital coach who interacted with the members.So first of all, you tell it what cultural background your coach came from and what neuro divergent characteristics they might have had. So now you know your member might be from Southeast Asia and they have dyslexia because that's the type of coach they've selected.So they're probably going to select somebody who's got similar characteristics to them. And now we can engage with that member on the appropriate basis, ask them some great onboarding questions. Do you have a family? Do you have kids?Do you have a house? And give them a digital illustration of their life. And now we can communicate with them in the way that they want. It was a great idea.So we had a lot of fun in that team. Some great ideas. We just don't have enough oomph to actually go and launch the super fund, but we hopefully will by next year.

Sarah Penn00:25:15

Well, the retirement only fund, when we all left the room, they were still in there. The whole lot of them were still in there talking for another 15 minutes afterwards.

Neil Benson00:25:21

So that was a great exercise. Thank you very much, Sarah for setting that up and taking us through. It was really well facilitated. In fact, the whole day was well done.

Sarah Penn00:25:27

Thank you. Yes, I facilitated today and John Burke ran yesterday which is a lot of fun.And those of you who know me will know that I'm quite fond of a microphone and a stage. So I had a great time.

Neil Benson00:25:40

Have we got any more events before the end of the year, Sarah?

Sarah Penn00:25:42

Oh my goodness, yes. Yes, we do have more events before the end of the year. Of course we do. What do we have coming up?So we have PDS round tables in person in Sydney and Melbourne. Melbourne next week, Sydney the week out.

Neil Benson00:25:58

I met one of your team who's been banished since Melbourne to run a PDS roundtable.

Zoe Sheehan00:26:02

Matthew.

Sarah Penn00:26:03

That's right.

Neil Benson00:26:04

He's not quite as excited about this trip as I might imagine. The weather'll be okay in Melbourne this time of year.

Sarah Penn00:26:09

Yeah, no, it'll be fun. So that's Sydney and Melbourne. It's the same sort of idea in both places. It's a panel discussion about managing your career when you're in product.So I'm really looking forward to both those. It's the first time we've run one in Melbourne in person. We did a Sydney one last year and got lots of good feedback.Not huge like sort of, you know, 15, 20 people.

Neil Benson00:26:30

Nice and intimate.

Sarah Penn00:26:30

Intimate. Good discussion.

Neil Benson00:26:32

So if people want to find out about those events, I guess visiting that super show, there's a sign up form. Yes, they can, I guess a first name and email address. That's all we ask for.And as long as they use a business email, they can sign up for that and they'll get a regular newsletter and all the events will be in there.

Sarah Penn00:26:48

That's right.

Neil Benson00:26:48

In a timely fashion so they can register.

Sarah Penn00:26:50

Yes, you'll start getting the the regular newsletter from Mayflower which is called the ssfpp which is the secret society of fin surf people.

Neil Benson00:26:58

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us Sarah. It's great to see you in person again. We'll catch up soon.

Sarah Penn00:27:01

You too. See you soon.

Neil Benson00:27:05

Thanks for listening to that super show. We hope today's episode give you something useful to take back to your team.

Sarah Penn00:27:10

If you're thinking we should talk, we'd love to chat. You can book a meeting with either of us via the link in the show notes.

Neil Benson00:27:16

And don't forget to follow the show, share it with a colleague and drop us a line if there's a topic you want us to tackle.

Sarah Penn00:27:21

Catch you next time on that super show.