Supercharged Conversations: Unpacking the Future Fund Admin Forum 2026

Welcome to that super show, the podcast where we talk about all things super from the inside.

I'm Neil Benson, Chief Product Officer at Chandler cx.

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.

And what could make it even better.

Let's get into it.

G', day, Sarah.

Hot on the heels on day one at the Future Fund Admin Forum 2026.

Let's recap.

Day two, it's all over.

How was it for you?

Yes.

Oh, it was excellent.

I really enjoyed the conference.

Actually made.

Made lots of new friends.

I really liked the focus on the member experience and what we're trying to deliver for members rather than just talking about the backend side of things.

I agree, but that's because I'm a marketing woman.

If you look at the title and some of the sessions on the program, you would think it was a very technical conference with lots of operational issues and there was some AML CTF content in there, for example.

But yeah, a lot of it just came around to the administration function.

Really supports that member experience.

So let's focus on the members really come through it very strongly.

I think so too.

So we started the day with Flow Wars Servicing as a differentiator in the new competitive landscape.

I think it needs that voice now.

I missed most of this because I was chairing the next panel and I had to go and find my speakers.

So tell me about it.

What did they say?

We had Mary Payne.

Mary is the Chief product officer at SS&C, you know, a big technology provider and administration outsourcing provider as well.

A couple of key takeaways from me was Mary shared a very personal story of her own father passing away.

And even as somebody who's in the industry, understands all the jargon and the buzzwords, found it incredibly difficult and didn't have a great experience working with her father's Superannuation Fund.

The language was very confusing.

Going through the identity verification process was very challenging.

You know, if that's what it's like when you're.

If you've got some expertise in the industry, can you imagine what it's like for the ordinary punter?

So we still have a long way to go.

Mary also reminded us that as well as our members, there are a lot of other classes of users in Superannuation and When we design business processes and portals and things like that, we ought to take into account the fact that there's members but we also are serving their advisors, their delegates, their beneficiaries in some cases, yeah, spouses, kids, in my case parents.

So I share the story of Mia, my 8 year old who's recently joined Care super and all her communications come to me and they know she's 8 years old but they still ask her to fill in a feedback satisfaction survey and ask her why her employer hasn't dumped her first SG contribution into the fund yet.

Hilarious.

Why haven't you Neil?

Well, we'll get right to it.

Did she empty the dishwasher?

That's right, chicken coop this weekend.

Yes, I've heard the same from other people in the industry actually someone fairly high up in insurance who said to me she thought she was pretty good at knowing how all this stuff worked and then a friend of hers, parent passed away and she said oh I'll help, I know how all this goes.

She said it was quite the eye opening experience of realising just how much you don't know and how hard it is.

Mary posed a gut punching question at the end of her session and Emma from Australian super commented later, oh, we always get compared to other industries, you know, insurance and banking and superannuation is different.

But Mary posed the question do you, do we suppose that there's other industry forums going on right now with people trying to copy ideas from superannuation?

They might be trying to copy the SGC.

That's pretty fun.

Yeah.

How can you grow to $4.5 trillion?

So that was a real thought provoking question I thought Mary posed at the end of our session and then we had your death and disability claims panel.

Right after which was.

I really enjoyed it.

It's funny, I had a huge list of questions just in case and we got through about a third of them which was fine because it ended up being a really open discussion actually around especially what CBUs, the changes that they have made.

So we had Kerry Vogel who's the head of insurance delivery and performance at cbus, Jocelyn Furlan who's the chair of Anz super and Ned and also was heavily involved or ran I think the Super Complaints Tribunal for a long time.

So she really knows her stuff.

And then Alison Bodiner who's Jeff's left ascender as the head of group proposition and product.

So it was a, it was a pretty power crew actually.

Assembled a group.

Yeah, yeah.

So Kerry has agreed to come on the.

On the POD and talk in detail about all the changes that she's made.

So we won't steal too much thunder, but they certainly have made some pretty significant changes, including actually changing the trust deed, which didn't get quite the gasp of surprise from the audience as it did from me personally, which I only heard on the day because changing a trustee is a big deal.

Justin's eyebrows nearly leapt off her head.

Yeah, they've made some very bold changes.

I thought it was great.

You know, CBUS has taken a battering in the media over the famous delays in 20, 23 and 24 that their chairman was up in front of the Senate and there was all sorts of, you know, bad press at the time.

So for Kerry to come out and share the story of how they've.

They've taken that on the chin, the changes they've made, the improvements to their service, it's really open and I really appreciate their transpar.

Yeah, me too.

As I said, won't steal the thunder, but they have made.

They've made significant changes.

They've really done that thing that happens so infrequently, actually, which is gone back to first principles of what the hell are we trying to do here?

What are we allowed to do legally?

Not just what does everybody else do, but what can we actually do to get a better experience for our members and drive down costs of doing it at the same time, which I thought was really fantastic.

It reminded me of one of the things that I've certainly seen over the years as a.

From a comms perspective, which is often communications are expected to somehow fix other things.

And when people say, well, you know, Your send was 50 pages long and the one is really hard to understand, and then they want you to fix it using better communication.

But a lot of the time it's not, to put too fine a point on it, you're trying to put lipstick on a pig, you know, and if the underlying machinery isn't any good or has just gotten more and more complicated over many years, which is generally what happens, then somehow expecting that communications will somehow magically fix it is just magical thinking.

That's the word I'm looking for.

Thinking.

That's right.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah, it was absolutely fascinating to hear.

And it was.

Jocelyn spoke a bit about systemic issues as well, and how often they come up.

Oh, actually she also spoke about a recent annual member meeting that she was involved in, which I said I wouldn't repeat on here.

But of course now I am that where things went badly awry and members couldn't get into the meeting, but they actually rang every single member that had registered for the meeting afterwards.

And the feedback they got was people were so impressed that they were getting a phone call and that someone was actually taking the time to call them and make an effort, that actually those people are probably now more loyal to the fund than they ever were before.

That's right.

A simple heart apology.

Yeah, it really does make a difference.

Again, the best written email in the world is nowhere near as good as someone getting on the blower and saying, hi, it's Sarah from XYZ Superfund and I'm really sorry that this happened and did you have any questions?

Yeah, yeah.

Great.

Next up.

That got us to morning tea.

It did.

And I'm really excited that Kerry's going to come on.

I was made lots of notes about the improvements that Seabus has made and some really exciting developments there.

But like you said, let's not steal her thunder.

Next we had Duncan McPherson from Borromeon Consulting.

Duncan is an expert at running large scale advice teams.

I think he ran the advice team at Lync.

Indeed he did, yep.

Had a lot of experience looking at digital financial advice and telephone based advice as well.

Great session there.

But my key takeaway was one to really try and persist the data that members share with you during that advice journey.

So I've been through quite a few recently, just experimenting or evaluating different funds, digital advice offerings.

You know, they know my age, they know my balance, but when I tell them whether or not I'm a homeowner, whether or not I have a partner, whether or not I have assets outside of Super, I would love it if they could remember that.

And so next time I do advice.

So the next time they do a retirement income projection, they have a baseline to work with of data that I've already shared and volunteered to provide them.

Fortunately, many farms take that data into their digital advice system and then dump it, forget all about it.

Yeah, lucky people are looking calculators and things.

I don't even think it, it's taken in.

I think it doesn't go on the server.

What do they say?

Stays client side?

Yeah, doesn't even get that far.

And then Duncan joined the panel that was next that Matt Jose from Mayfair moderated.

I was joined on the panel with Tim Mitchell Adams from Prime super as well.

We had a great old chat about digital financial advice.

I didn't make any notes during this.

I was on the stage.

No, I, I really enjoyed it.

I volun told Matt that he was Going to be moderating a panel, but I thought he did very well.

So shout out to you, Matt, for your first moderation gig.

Yeah, I thought it was a really good discussion and just a good reminder that there is lots that can be done.

There's still so much upside to be had.

I took a bit of a contrarian view, maybe compared to Tim and Duncan.

I did evaluate the digital financial advice offering from five different funds, scored them out of 10.

One got a three and the other.

The other's got less than that.

And I kind of reflected that I don't really know if I want my superannuation fund providing financial advice because it has to be so limited in its scope.

They're never going to recommend another fund.

I wouldn't expect if I went to my bank that they would recommend a different home loan product from a different lender.

So it would be great if I could get my data out of my superannuation fund and into maybe a.

A traditional personal finance tool like PocketSmith, which is the ones I use.

I can connect my bank to it and I can connect all the other providers, but I can't connect my super to it.

And we've got OpenAI just recently launched Personal Finance ChatGPT.

It's available in the US at the moment and you can connect that to 12,000 different financial institutions there.

That's going to arrive in Australia very soon, I'm sure.

And we're still not going to be able to connect our superannuation account to it because the consumer data.

Right.

Which is now available, open banking and utilities.

It stopped short and was closed in 2023 and the government seems to have no interest in picking it up again.

So we have a closed super system.

Yes.

Unfortunately, the CDR didn't do what everyone hoped it.

By everyone, I mean the government didn't do what people hoped it would do, which is that the average man in the street would use all this amazing data that they now had access to to compare between banks and between utilities and make better decisions and save tons of money and everyone and have a lovely time.

And because that is what's happened in other jurisdictions, that did not happen here.

And so the whole thing sort of came to a screaming halt.

There have been some quiet successes, I think maybe we didn't all see.

So for example, when I got.

I went to extend my home loan for renovations, my bank just said, oh, please give us permission to connect into your other financial institutions to check your level of borrowings or savings.

Did that.

Great.

No problem.

No, give us your username and password for another bank, which is what they used to do, or print off an annual bank statement and send it to us.

They were using open banking in order to be able to make that happen and it was very seamless experience.

Similarly with my financial advisor recently.

So there are instances like that there's lots of new fintechs emerging that do make use of open banking to power their products.

So it's not as rapid as we all hoped, but I think we're slowly adopting that service.

Well the thing was though, I think the plan was it wasn't that the banks were going to use it to deliver better stuff because they already, you know, it's making it slightly quicker and easier but not making much different.

The idea was that consumers were going to use it to do all these amazing things and that hasn't happened.

So from the government's perspective of who were they really helping here it's a hell of a lot of legislation and change.

But if no, if it's not really making much different to much difference to end consumers, then the whole thing of the why bother when especially when there's so much else on.

I think with Shield First Guardian happening as well, anything to do with super advice, all the rest of it's just suddenly parked on the back burner.

Well we did hear from Joshua Coot from Telstra super about how they're using the cdr.

I think it's mostly pension payments just to validate a bank account.

So does this member own this bank account?

And they're using the open banking protocol for that just to do account verification.

And then they're also using CDR for direct debit verification.

So I think some of the problems were with members wanted to make a one time withdrawal.

You know it could be a substantial amount of money, 50 grand or something to buy yourself buy a new car.

Because they crashed it because they were third in the road behind an Uber driver.

Not talking about anyone I know it.

Can be pretty challenging to withdraw over bpay big one time lumps of money.

So they wanted to look at a one time direct debit where the limits are typically much higher and they used CDR to achieve that.

And finally was the heartbreaking story of the challenges trying to use NPP and OSKO to make real time payments on batch.

So if you've got a regular pension withdrawal that happens every two weeks and you get your $4,000 out of your Telstra super pension account, then they wanted to use Osco to make that a real time payment.

What we heard is OSCO is not really set up for business to consumer batch payments.

So no, it's very much one to one because it's the back end of PayID, isn't it?

That's right, I think.

Yep.

Yeah.

So it's one to one.

When you're suddenly doing one to many, it all got a bit more exciting.

Exciting is the word for it.

I have to say though, it was one of those presentations where it didn't look that exciting.

There weren't sort of new big ideas in it, but it was really interesting to see what had worked and what hadn't worked on a really specific bit of kit and lessons learned that other funds can take away when they want to then do the same thing.

And I think that is one of the things with these sort of conferences.

It's great to have the mix of the big ideas and the future and all that and then it's really great to actually have some specific lived experience.

I tried to do this or we tried to do this and this is what worked and this is what did not work because then the next time someone else who saw that presentation goes to do the same thing, they'll be, they'll be in a much better place.

And that is that sort of rising tide lifts all boat stuff that I,.

Yeah, I like to see.

So, you know, Telstra super is a pretty modest sized fund.

If you're working with a bigger fund, trying to streamline payments, trying to do anything innovative with cdr, with open banking, you know, Joshua Kut has tried it, done it, been there and got the T shirt.

So it's great that he's sharing that story.

And I do hope that people like auspay plus are paying attention because they want to see these products taken up and, you know, they've got an early trailblazer sharing the story of some of the challenges they had.

So hopefully the banking system and AusPay plus could fix some of those gaps.

I hope so.

And then we were back to the big picture.

Amazing future.

What can we have?

Stuff with Frank Adler from HCL Software, who.

One of the slides he put up was a.

The idea of a single fund and what the app might look like for someone who was receiving a pension versus someone who was just starting out, using the same data but having a different experience for people, different people at different life stages.

And that did get a bit of a gasp from the audience, I've got to say.

Yeah, yeah, I really liked it.

So I can imagine one app with a different skin, if you like, depending upon your preferences, but I think the way that Frank presented it was depending upon your age.

Here's the Boomer version, here's the X version, here's the millennium version.

I'm an ex, but I like emojis in my op.

Can I have some emojis?

Well, apparently Gen X is like emojis.

My daughter was telling me last night, she said, do you use emojis in your emails and things at work, Mum?

I said yes.

She's like, oh my God.

Oh my God.

I think.

I wasn't sure.

We're too old to use emojis anymore.

Or.

Yeah, I don't know.

There was a gasp when Frank imagine the future where your superannuation fund could detect that you're pregnant, for example, probably if you're a female member.

Using unspecified signals for the Frank can imagine you can acquire as a data collector inside a super fund and then, you know, makes helpful suggestions that somebody might want to check their insurance or pause the contributions or something like that.

So I think that I like the idea of gathering third party data and having more insight into our member, especially if we want to do some of this really important life stage based engagement.

We all, you know, we had a good laugh and a giggle at the kind of.

Where's the.

Where do you draw the line between surveillance and life stage based engagement?

Well, I think where you draw the line is if you appreciate it, it's life stage based engagement.

And if you don't appreciate it, it's Big Brother and surveillance.

But then I guess you can use the big data stuff to decide if someone's going to think that it's a life based staged engagement or if it's Big Brother, you can probably start with how many cats they have.

So it was an interesting demo of some emerging technology there in Frank's session it was called Member Engagement 3.0.

And I like the interaction he had with a synthetic contact center.

Agent Frank made the point that.

Apologies, that there's a long wait time that's no longer acceptable.

And a lot of member inquiries be handled by a chatbot, a voice bot.

Some basic transactions could all be handled while you're representatives are all busy dealing with members with more complex issues.

Yeah, the whole we're experiencing large call volumes.

I've got to say it's a bit of a red rag to a bull for me.

Like I know it happens, fully aware that it happens.

But seriously people, no one rings their bank or Telstra or their super fund or whatever unless they absolutely have to.

And then when you make them wait 45 minutes to talk to someone.

Yep.

It's just not good.

Yeah.

Anyway, moving on.

I think the last session I attended was the one on operationalizing AML CTR with Ron Mullins from Napier AI.

Quite a technical session.

Talk about D in the weeds.

Not an area of my expertise or passion, to be honest.

But I think it's just a reminder that given the size of the superannuation system, the ability to get into it and launder large amounts of money is frightening.

If you can get a massive contribution into a super fund and then roll it over through a few different super funds out to an SMSF that's got an offshore bank account that's pretty damaging to the whole system, let alone, you know, all the scams and the frauds and everything else that the, the folks in financial crime have to deal with.

So yes, that was kind of my take out of it as well.

They quitted themselves.

Well, but it's complicated.

They did for a small brand like.

Mine and very important, like obviously it's very important.

Yeah, I'm more a member experience.

End of this.

Yeah, I like this.

You know, I think we've talked about this before.

The overall size of the forum, I think there's probably 80 or 90 people in the room.

There weren't any spare chairs.

It's quite an intimate sized group.

You get to meet a lot of people and spend time with them in the lobby having a coffee or a cup of tea.

Yeah.

Lunchtime conversations and things.

Great.

I probably got another Couple of dozen LinkedIn connections of people that I had a good chat with and I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, same.

I, yeah, met lots of interesting people and had lots of really good conversations.

The last session, the interactive roundtable which was around building the ideal member experience.

There were lots of interesting ideas that came out of that and in fact that was where we really did get into the whole discussion around, is it Big Brother or is it a better member experience?

Coming back to where we started, it's all in the communication.

It's all about what you say with that data.

If you say to someone, you know, our surveillance suggests you're pregnant, would you like to blah, blah, blah.

It probably won't go down very well if you send them an email saying, hi, you know, this is your fund.

We often find people about your age and stage of life are thinking about or having babies.

Here's some things you might want to consider that probably does go down well.

We had Emma from Australian super at the table and it's just a reminder of the.

When you operate at scale like that, whatever LG super has these days, 3 million members or something, you know, trying to segment your members and having not one to one, but, you know, quite intimate conversations is incredibly difficult.

They've got members of every demographic in every part of Australia and every industry.

Industry.

And trying to find messages that resonate with, with large groups of people is very challenging.

Also, when you have, you know, an SLA to do something 99% of the time perfectly, that 1% could be a large number of people for whom it might not go perfectly, you have to be in the operations team, you have to be willing to accept that, you know, you can set yourself really high targets, but when things don't go perfectly, large numbers of people get impacted and you have to learn to deal with that at scale.

Yeah, yeah.

That was a really interesting, interesting discussion, wasn't it, about the trade offs between.

If you want to have, you know, 99% of people get X experience, that means you're making the decision that 1% won't.

But when you turn that into real member numbers, it's maybe 30,000 people.

So are you prepared to have 30,000 people who don't have a good enough experience?

And if the answer is no, then you have to resource up to be able to close that last gap and that's very, very expensive.

And then the question, best financial interests of all members to close that gap.

So I thought that was a really interesting conversation.

Good sort of thought provoker.

To finish the conference fund.

It was, you know, we have funds from all ends of the spectrum, from the very small intimate funds right up to the biggest funds in the country in attendance.

And they're all facing similar challenges.

But the scale can magnify the challenges for some of the bigger ones.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then we all went downstairs for a ipa, not a pa, an IPA or a vodka soda.

Yeah.

Which was a lovely way to finish,.

Lovely way to finish the afternoon and great, great time.

Hi by all.

So I'm looking forward to a couple of the other IBR sessions coming up later in the year.

We've got Engage 2025, which I'm thrilled to say is going to be in Melbourne this August.

Yep, that's good news.

Anybody involved in member engagement and communications needs to check that one out.

I will put a link to that in the, in the show notes and just quickly look up the date.

It is going to be August 27th in Melbourne.

Last year, Wilson City was a really well attended event, but given the number of funds, particularly those who work in engagement and growth.

Hosting in Melbourne this year should make it easier for everybody to attend.

Yes, that was a really great conference last year, actually.

So looking forward to, looking forward to doing that one again.

We'll see you there.

Yes, Sarah, thanks so much for taking some time to catch up and give us a recap on day two.

We'll see you soon.

See you soon.

Bye for now.

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