Mega funds to fuel tech and cyber-security attention

Superannuation fund trustees will need to allocation greater resources and attention to technology and cyber-security as the industry gives rise to ‘mega funds’, InPayTech believes.

In an analysis, the firm’s chief executive, Dean Martin, said mega funds would be managing a larger pool of total super assets and the complexity of asset transfers in amalgamation processes, will make fund members’ data even more vulnerable to errors and security breaches.

Martin said this would require “enhanced attention to data mismatch and error management, and increased knowledge transfer and cooperation between funds and other third parties in the eco-system.  This was well illustrated with the recently stolen identities of thousands of consumers resulting in more than $10 million being ripped from retirement and share trading accounts”.

He noted that the roles of chief risk officer and chief technology officer would acquire greater budgets and significance in the internal hierarchy than is was the case now.

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“However, the overall onus of security and data integrity sits squarely on the shoulders of the funds, their trustee boards and executive teams who will begin the year 2020 knowing that the security of their members’ retirement monies is one of the paramount issues they face,” he said.

Martin said there was also a prospective shift in assets from the self-managed super fund (SMSF) sector back into mega-scaled and ‘ultra-low-cost giant’ super funds.

“This is likely to mean that the regulatory environment for the remittance and processing of rollovers (and contributions more generally) will become increasingly complex, and subject to greater regulatory, political and community pressures and constraints,” he said.

“As the volume of assets and focus shifts from the ‘accumulation’ to the ‘decumulation’/’drawdown’ stages, this will have implications and opportunities for innovation from pay-tech providers and related participants.”

Pay-tech vendors would need to develop scalable systems and processes to enable funds and financial organisations to quickly and effectively process the “ever-increasing volumes of synchronous flows of financial, personal, and other data”.