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

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. Welcome to that Super Show. Today I'm flying solo, well, sort of, because actually I have another Sarah and a Ben in the room.Today we are tackling a topic that most people avoid until they absolutely have to deal with it, which is death benefit claims and deceased estates. And in superannuation, I would like to say that we're better at dealing with it than your average mum and dad, but there's work to do anyway.So when someone dies, families are grieving, people are overwhelmed and then they hit the super fund and try and get their money and that doesn't always go so well. So there's $5.4 trillion of intergenerational wealth transfer that's currently underway, according to Jamie Weir. So the pressure is on.So today we've got Sarah Poole and Ben Darlow from Estate Exchange.They've led large scale transformations in deceased estate processing already and now they are working on how to modernise how organizations handle one of the most sensitive interactions they'll ever have with customers. So let's get into it. Ben and Sarah, why don't you tell me a bit about Estate Exchange, why you started it, who you are, all those things.

Absolutely. So thanks Sarah.I'm Sarah Poole, another Sarah, former lawyer and have run executive programs across public and private sector, mainly leading customer experience transformation across regulated environments and found myself as head of deceased estates at Major bank during the time we were doing a regulatory uplift in the context of banking after the hay and Royal Commission and started a state exchange off the back of that experience. Experience as a lawyer and personal experience administering my mother in law's estate.Ben and I worked together at NAB and he has kindly come across to work at Estate Exchange. Over to you Ben.

Thanks Sarah, thanks for having me. So yeah, Ben Dalo here. I'm the product executive at Estate Exchange, been here for a couple of years now, basically since we started the business.Prior to that 20 plus years with the NAB in various roles across commercial banking, exec support, shared services, operations, tech and transformation.But the last four years or so of my time at nab, I led a major transformation program which was fundamentally rethinking how NAB as an entire organization dealt with, with customer death events. That's what brings me to Estate Exchange, extending that vision and work beyond just a single organization.

Yeah, right. So that's probably a bit of a dumb question, but why are death benefit claims still so manual and paper heavy in most places in 2026?How have we got this far?

Well, I mean the context in this space and certainly behind our business is that the death of a customer or member, whether you're in superannuation banking, any sector has historically been underinvested in.So, you know, no regulation, not necessarily a revenue center, systems and processes that evolved over time and often teams that really hadn't experienced change.And what was common across all of these sectors is that then suddenly there's pressure, shifting community expectations, media on the topic, changing regulatory environment, compliance obligations, reporting boards under pressure. And we saw that banking, we saw it with the Haywell Commission that lodged sanctions across the banking sector.We saw the Banking Code of Practice implement deceased estates provisions, reports that came out in respect of the banks. And we saw it again with superannuation, with ASIC's report last year and all telling a similar story of work that's been done.But there's still more to do in. When you look at sort of across the board, there's. There's different organizations that are at different stages of their journey.So some have worked to fix certain parts of the process, some probably have a lot more to do than others.But one thing that is common across the board is that when you are an organization, you're looking at your processes in relation to your member or your customer. There's work to be done, there's processes to be fixed.But when you sort of flip onto the side of the, the member or the customer, the family that is left behind after somebody passes away, they are not just dealing with one organization, they are in it's not siloed situation. They are facing into 37. We know that from a report that we've recently commissioned with Deloitte Access Economics.They're facing into 37 assets or services and all with their own processes and all with different requirements.So even if one organization has fixed up their process or they've built a fancy portal or they've got a really great call center and amazing forms, they're still dealing with 37 of those processes. And it's not until you really look at it from a system level that you can See how much duplication and inefficiency there is across the board.And these things do lead to delays, they do lead to poor experience, they do lead to SLAs being missed. And that's, that's the perspective that we bring to the, to the problem.

Yeah, yeah. I literally just over the last week, my dad's just redone his will and I've. We've changed things around. So I'm now the executor.And when you say 37 organizations, I just think, oh, God, yeah, it's true. And I hate paperwork.

And executives are often, you know, it's interesting how less something with less obligation, less legal responsibility comes with more rigor and framework around it than becoming an executor. A lot of people take it on and they're just like, yeah, yeah, that sounds like something that I'm happy to do.But they don't realize really what they're taking on. So it's tough.

I did try to get him to appoint a lawyer, but for various complicated family reasons, he didn't want to do that, which is very annoying anyway, if he can't say, well, I'm the executor with. The first thing I'll be doing is appointing to someone to do it anyway.Lawyer Sarah, we're not here to talk about my personal issues, although, you know, I'm always here for it.So I guess that's a, That's a really interesting thing, isn't it, that I hadn't really thought about the fact that if you're one of them, so you're a super fund, and often people might still have more than one super fund. If you're a super fund, you're one out of that 30 list of 37 things. You're probably one of the bigger amounts of money that the person's trying to.The poor executor's trying to sort out. So then how could. Or should the super fund, a super fund, be thinking about that?So does that then play into things like how long you think is reasonable to expect someone to take to get you the next bit of paper if they've got 37 concurrent processes going on, all that sort of thing.So, you know, you look at the list of what makes claims take a long time, and people point to things like, oh, you know, well, the customer never told us, gave us XYZ bit of information, but maybe we're not really thinking about that sensibly. If they're on the receiving end of 37 requests to said bit of information.

Yeah, Absolutely. I think, you know, every trustee has an obligation to do their best by their members.What we see though, and this is true across all different industries within financial services, is a tendency to try and put everything through a standardized procedure, force everything through the same sausage machine and expect it to behave the same way.Whereas in reality, and this is true across banking and death claims in super is some things are really straightforward and really easy and don't need to have 10 tests applied to them.So when you consider how much time, effort, operational expense is being spent on a case, often you can find that you're spending the same amount of effort and time and cost on a really low value case as you would be on a much higher value case. One of the things we found here is there's definitely an opportunity to triage cases early establish is this something simple?Can we get through this with one document, two documents? What's the minimum we require here?Can we self serve those documents rather than asking some poor grieving widow to go and find that document, take it to a jc, get it certified, send it into us. What can we take control of and self serve? What is the minimum that we can put this through?Where's the threshold where we go, okay, above this value, maybe that's higher risk. Maybe those are the cases that we need to apply a bit more testing in rigor to.And that's, that's messaging which seems to be resonating well across, across all industries at the moment.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? I studied queuing theory at university back in the day because I am a nerd.

That's great niche.

It is very nice. But it's so relevant to this stuff. Right?Because one of the, that's one of the basic concepts of queuing theory is that if you have a special cue for anything that's particularly difficult, it speeds the whole machine up rather than just pushing everything, everyone through the same sort of standardized queue.The other thing that's sort of inherent in what you just said then is around the risk management and you know, how much is a super fund prepared to lose occasionally in order to speed everything up? So if Grandma's only got 500 bucks, you know, how many levels of rigor do you need around that? And maybe one in 100 or one in a thousand.You get wrong and you have to re, you know, pay it out to someone different versus, you know, senior executive somewhere dies in their 50s with a huge amount of money in their super fund and obviously you've got to be a lot more careful. What are some of the ways you can come at risk managing that better?

I think triage is super important in the first instance. Not the risk management bit itself, but just making that distinction before you start. You know in your own what you say.When you think about costs across trustee, administrator, insurer, juniors within a trustee, executives within a trustee, the cost of responding to EFCA claims, etc. It's very easy to see how the costs rack up on these things.So I mean it's fairly fundamental cost benefit analysis of trying to work out how many of these and of what value are we prepared to get wrong in a, a given period of time and then manage to that. I mean, and being flexible I think is always important with risk management. You won't get it right every time.Certainly the work that Sarah and I did at NEB in the first instance, we were far too conservative. We were responding to some regulatory challenges and we went really hard on being risk averse.Your members will tell you very quickly when you've got it wrong and when you're being too prescriptive or too inflexible. And so I think being prepared to listen to that feedback when it comes and act on it and flex around that is super critical.

It's interesting with that in mind as well, different organizations will have their own risk appetite.Again when you flip it and you put yourself in the shoes of the family that's dealing with 37 organizations and they all have their own different risk appetites. So you know, you might have a requirement to have certain documents if the amount is over a certain value.And that value threshold will be different across all of the sectors and probably should be.But it is an interesting perspective to add into the mix of really putting yourself in the shoes of the person who you are serving at that moment and understanding that they're not just dealing with you and, and your particularities.

Yeah, it's interesting you say about getting, you know, feedback from, taking notice of feedback from customers and things. One of the things that come out in a super reporting from ASIC and APPA is that the reporting actually within organizations has been perhaps not.This is the thing like I'm sure there's, and I know there are, there are so many reports flying around, right, with numbers and stats and graphs and stuff everywhere.But, but somehow this, this went from being a small problem to a very, very large problem before anyone kind of twigged of how much of a mess the whole thing was in. And then I actually heard the the CEO of CBA say the other day. Well, he just didn't know. He didn't know how bad it was.Which raises a whole lot of other questions. But anyway about like why didn't he know? How far down the chain did you have to go before you got to someone who did know?Or was it just the, just the boiling frog thing? So you know, if you're a CEO or on a board or C suite of a big fund, it has a million other things that's being reported up the line.What are the, what are the kind of key things that you really want to be seeing on that reporting that's going to help, you know when things are going pear shaped. Going pear shaped before they really do go pear shaped.

The first thing Ben, Ben sort of did a lot of this work for us and he knows the ins and outs people have a really good perspective to add. But I. One thing that is really important to note there is reporting is only as good as the information you have.And when you know, one of the traps is that reporting can look really good, but what are you measuring?And like that is individual organization specific, but it's also across the board without standardization of how things are calculated, it's really hard to measure fund against fund and sector against sector when you are measuring different things and the reporting inputs are different. And I just, you know, I say that from, you know, the good old sort of thing.When you see all green, maybe that's not, that's not necessarily a good thing.And so you know that that's really important and but I think as well, if you don't have the systems fixed yet, you don't really know what you're measuring, what you're managing.

Yeah.

Then reporting, reporting is, you know, it really depends on what's sort of sitting underneath that. Some of the stuff that we looked at was just looking at what are we actually managing. Identifying clear stages of the, of the life cycle.So tying to milestones and what's the significance like reporting you can have stacks of data but actually where's the.So what, what does this, what is this telling about the, the experience and definitely from my perspective in the head of role was how do we use this to improve things? So is it meaningful? What are we doing with it? That's sort of really one of the key factors.But you might sort of have a bit more detail to add in the capturing and things.

Yeah, Sarah's down. Right. In terms of the. What you get out of it. It all is going to ultimately come back to whatever your system is that's managing it.So it's actually quite hard to talk about reporting without kind of thinking first about the underlying system that manages it. Ultimately that's going to be where that data is captured. That can spin out in your report month, end weekend or intraday or whatever works.But in that respect, I say you've got to start in with your process design and go, what does that process need to achieve? And this is not rocket science. Any process engineer will talk to this. But what does the process have to achieve?I think one of the critical things here though is to think about is to make sure that in designing process and in designing the case management software and technology that sits around that we're thinking about that what do we need to achieve internally from this process? But what does the customer experience need to be delivered at the back of that as well?You say your technology and systems up to deliver that customer experience and that internal risk management or user experience. The data points should flow easily from that life cycle stage. I think is a point Sarah raised there.There's a huge amount of difference between knowing that something is 15 days in your system, depending whether that's 15 days in the system and no one's picked it up or said hi yet versus 15 days in the system at the back end. And we're on our third round of claim stoking. They're very different.And not everyone's case management system is mature enough to make that distinction. So I think that's super critical.The other thing I think is really important here is anything that gives you an average and gives you a view of your whole portfolio is going to be really useful. That's probably the headline number that execs are going to be interested in.The regulators are going to be more interested in the exceptions to that. So it's fine if your average Turnaround Time was 14 days and everyone's happy with that.But if you had 20% of your cases that are outside of that and 20% that are really short and that skews your average, then that's not great. So you've got to make sure that you pick up both sides of every statistic and every reporting metric, so you tell the whole picture. Yeah.The other thing that I think is really important in this space is the data becomes super important to avoid getting caught spending your time putting out fires. Typically, what happens in this space is that complaints are very stressful. They're high pressure, they get a lot of attention.They go up the chain to executive Level very quickly. We were, as we've said, in one of the larger banks, it was not unusual for a complaint in the deceased estate space to hit the CEO's desk.And then it becomes, what's gone wrong? What are we doing about it? When are you fixing it? How did this happen?And you very quickly end up spending senior employees time putting out fires where actually that was one thing that actually didn't go wrong. It went right. The person just didn't like the answer.And here were 5,000 other cases that went through the machine smoothly and were perfect and nobody complained. So moving away from that kind of anecdotal, putting out fires, busy work that can happen.Reporting is going to help you with that if you get it right.

There's a cultural element too. I mean, it's such a broad word. But if the culture is. It's all green, it's all green.You can then start to see behaviors coming down the line of, well, how do we report in such a way that keeps everything green? Especially when you're going through a program of transformation and you're taking something that was to something that will be. You want it.You actually want a culture where you're surfacing, you know, the red. Like that's the culture that you want to breed because that's when you get to surface the issues and you can actually fix them.

I've seen this in many organizations, but as soon as something isn't green, everyone starts running around like headless chickens.And then it becomes this thing where people are actively trying to work out, well, if I just look at it from this angle or I slightly change how I written the written the goal or I just push this date out over here slightly. I can, I can convince myself it's still green.

Yes.

And then what happens actually is that everything stays green until suddenly it's red. Because there's no in between stage. Because there really, there was an in between stage.But no one, no one wants to stick their head up and go, ah, guys, we were talking about this in my own business the other day actually around. How do we, how do we flag when something is starting to go off pace?When you're starting to get those signals that if we keep going in this direction, doing this thing, we're going to end up in a very bad place. How do you encourage people to be okay to say, I'm not sure that that's, that's quite right.It's interesting what you say too about like when it's a project, you're making a Transformation, of course, some stuff's not going to work how you thought it was going to work. So it's utterly unreasonable to think that it should all just be all green, because this isn't bau. This is transformation.

Yeah, yeah.

You want your BAU process as much as you can to be green all the time. Right. Because if they're not green, it means something's starting to go sideways.But if you're transforming or do you think even in, even in bau, maybe you need to have finer gradations so you can have things maybe flagging as orange more easily.

Clear lead indicators and clear lag indicators and hopefully your lags are green and your leads are telling you where you might be leading to problems.But I think it's like the culture of surfacing issues and acknowledging that actually the fact that they're surfaced is a good thing because then you can address it. You just cannot address what you don't know. But certainly the large organizations are really good generally with their lead and lag indicators.They spend a lot of time on them.

So, yep. Being clear. Do you see that in super as well or is that still a more of a nascent thing in super seems.

To be getting like. Seems to be, especially in the last months. Yeah. I mean, they're strong on their risk.

Yes.

Their risk controls.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's.I think that's part of the reason, as I understand it from speaking to some of the execs and some of the big fun, one of the reason we've ended up in with a lot of super funds taking a long time is that they were trying to do exactly what you said earlier, Ben, which is make sure you got every decision absolutely perfect.If that's your main goal, then things will slow down and they will get slower and slower and slower as you make better and better and better decisions. But you're into not delivering any additional benefit to the fund or to the member while the whole thing gets slower.Hey, speaking of slower, but maybe in a good way, how about the fraud risk side of things?So do you guys see much in terms of how do you make sure that the right people are getting the money or do you think really we've swung so far the other way that actually that's much less of an issue.

Than it looks and certainly growing risk? We just. Quick anecdote.When I started the work at NAB was late 2019 and I went through the risk event records and there was nothing on record at NAB going back as far as records began around attempted fraud. In the assessment when I left in February 24th there were events.It was not in the kind of magnitude that we see in other areas of fraud across financial services. But certainly, certainly we're seeing instances across all financial services industries of kind of aversion of ID takeover fraud.And in some ways it's a good place for fraudsters to play. Right. Because you've got high value assets. The account owner is not with us anymore in most cases.So that's one less person who's going to discover something on the way through. In other respects it's not such a rich place to play because it tends to be a one off transaction, one interaction. It's not a repeatable pattern.

Then you can't convince a dead person that you're a prince in Nigeria.

That's it. And you can only claim the death benefit once. Right. And you can only get the payout from the banks of that of that value once.But certainly we're seeing it. I don't have stats to hand. There's certainly. You got something now.

Yeah, you now have to like Access Economics Survey which was conducted across administrators and those that have been dealing with a deceased estate. Nine percent of consumers surveyed have experienced fraud and 17% experienced a near miss in relation to the deceased person's affairs.If you compare that across the board, like credit card fraud is sitting at 10% so it's pretty high. It certainly emerging in our time working in this space as well.

Yeah.

So and I mean just with the era of AI and the ability to quite easily pull fake documents off the Internet. Take that. I mean I don't want to tell people how to do this but you know, take it to a pharmacist and get it certified and pop it in.

Post, you're off to the races.

Yeah, it's not, it's not that that hard. In the sort of paper based world there's obviously technology like ours that are looking to, they provide ways to solve for that.But yeah, it's pretty emerging.

Part of the challenge in this space as well is as organizations are driven more to be to provide their members and their customers clarity of what their process is, then everyone's process is open. So everyone can see what a given super fund's process is, where their thresholds are set, what documentation is required. Same with the banks.So you kind of, it's very clear to a fraudster what the hurdles are that they need to overcome, which documents they need to buy off the dark web. So that's a real challenge.I Think and the other thing here is that often the people undertaking the operational process tend to be junior in the scheme of the organization. They're not necessarily at the investment in identification of fraudulent documents, even if they had its incredibly difficult these days.It's basically the toss of a coin for experienced professionals whether they can identify a fraudulent ID document or not. So that is certainly an emerging theme and anyone in financial services should have a keen eye on this.

So, yeah, tell us a bit more about Estate Exchange.

What does it do?

What is it? Give us a spiel.

Great questions.Well, if we think about it at the top, top level of what we're doing is looking at that 5.4 trillion in intergenerational wealth transfer that's happening over the next 20 years. There really isn't the infrastructure or the rails in place to support that transfer of wealth from an administration perspective.And with 180,000 people or more dying here each year, that's the average that we work off over 5. But it has been high, it is generally higher than that. But that's the stat we work off.But all of their families, their advisors, they're really fronting into a system that's fragmented, it's manual, and it's failing them at one of the most difficult times in their lives. And so we see a world where the assets and services of the deceased are able to be managed in a simple, secure, sympathetic way.We're looking at a connective infrastructure, if you like, that brings the parties together in a trusted collaborative environment to be able to exchange information, documentation, verify information, and really act with confidence in relation to the data that's provided.So it's really taking that experience of doing something 37 different ways and doing it once and allowing those 37 organizations to be able to self serve. And we know organizations want to do better. They invest in their customers and member experience for the whole life.And then there's this final moment that matters that really gets neglected and we know they want to do better. So here we are to provide a tool that enables them to do that. Yep, it is, it is a platform, it is here for professionals to engage with each other.So it is there in the situation where there's a lawyer or an advisor, or it might be an accountant, trustee that's representing the deceased family, they want to are administering the estate and their affairs and enabling them to open a workspace in Estate Exchange and go through that sharing of information and validation of documentation inside secure trusted platform.

Yeah, right.So if they've got 37 processes to go through and 10 steps in each, maybe you know, five of those steps they can do within the system and so do it once and it works.

Across the 37 and verifying the documents where it's able to be checked against a source of truth. You know, why are we doing it in today's world in a, in a paper based, you know, put it in the post, put this one in this portal, do this, do that.It just doesn't make sense in 2026. So we integrate with the sources of truth where they're available, enabling things to be checked and verified in platform.So we know it's delivering cost out opportunities, efficiency gains. It's enabling funds and organizations to deliver on their SLAs and reducing the risk and having a better customer experience at the end of the day.

Yeah, that is the winning trifecta isn't it? Cost less, better experience, lower risk.

It's hard to get, you know, we've seen it firsthand. Usually if you're improving the customer experience, you're increasing the risk score you.

Yep. Oh it's costing a lot more.

Yeah, costing more because put more people on it. So it is, it is hard to get all of those things and so you know we're, look this is why we're here.We're really motivated by, by delivering this into the Australian community and yeah, great to see that the take up is their organizations want to do better and they're getting behind it.

Yeah, yeah. So have you got any of the big super funds signed up yet or you're still in the process?

Yeah, we've got some signed up and some process. Yep. And it's across super and other sectors as well. So it's going to be a very big year for estate exchange in 2026.

Yeah. So what do you think is going to change in the next, I don't know, five or 10 years?Like what do you think the future of all this is going to look like? I guess what's the best case scenario versus you know, obviously worst cases we just continue what we're doing and muddle along.But where's best co technology is moving.

Really quickly and I can see a world where, I mean there's companies in building things like digital vaults and you know, where people can start to record what assets they, they have and where things are located. We're not trying to do that but others that are very good at that are doing that.You can almost see a world where, where there's that or maybe it doesn't need to be Recorded, because there are other technologies that have emerged that enable us to have a digital record of what we own. But certainly it's not going to look like those things being kept in the cupboard in a filing cabinet. It's going to be different.And so you can see a world where there's.There's something of that that, you know, executives are known, maybe they're registered, somebody passes away, keys are handed over quickly and seamlessly. Probate becomes faster because assets are known.Estate Exchange can provide the platform for the distribution and the closure of those assets and services and then distribution in a really timely manner. Freeing up funds into the economy, you know, that's. That's another thing. It's locked up.So freeing up funds into the economy and putting it in the hands of the. The beneficiaries, you know, avoiding situations where. And we used to see it all the time, we still see it.People who've passed away and their spouses are left with accounts that have been frozen and they can't even pay for their groceries. They're borrowing money off the kids, or worse, not borrowing money off people because they're embarrassed and scrounging.And I've seen it in friends and I've seen it in close proximity and it's really quite awful. So. So that's the world we see, Sarah, is. Things are seamless, frictionless, fast and, you know, better for all involved.

Sounds amazing. I'm there, I'm totally signed up with my dad redoing his will and stuff at the moment.He and his wife, they're planning on sitting all, all five of us children down shortly and talking us through everything and how it's all. How it's all planned out. So there's hopefully no surprises at the other end, which I'm told is, you know, what one is supposed to do these days.Thank you both so much, Ben and Sarah.This is really, I think, an interesting hot topic right now, but also something where there's a lot of people just trying very hard to do much better.So it's really great to hear what you both went through at NAB Post, the Royal Commission, because that's the other thing that of course happens, I'm sure, in any industry within. Super. We feel like we're the first people ever to get, you know, wrapped over the knuckles about death benefit claims.But actually that was one of the big outcomes out of the Hayne Royal Commission that was that banks needed to do better on death benefit handling. It's just that you're, I guess, five years ahead or six years ahead of where the super funds are. On the same journey?

Yeah, it's also on the same journey. And happy to share our insights, of course. Anytime.

Absolutely.

Thank you very much. All right, that's it for this episode of that super show.Don't forget to subscribe to us on whatever podcast player you listen to, and we'll see you all soon. Thanks very much.

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