MySuper has added cost rather than value

19 March 2013

| By Mike |

The Government's MySuper regime has added little value to superannuation funds and a great deal of cost, according to a roundtable conducted by Super Review ahead of this month's Conference of Major Superannuation Funds (CMSF).

Both Club Plus chief executive Paul Cahill and Deloitte partner Russell Mason suggested that MySuper had not achieved the original objectives outlined in the Cooper Review and that, instead, it had added cost and complexity to the system.

"I look at MySuper and while it may have started off with the best of intentions, I would argue it's added no value whatsoever to the membership," Mason said.

"Ninety-nine per cent of funds have simply changed at the end of the day their default option to the MySuper option.

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"We haven't seen any great change but we've seen untold millions and millions of dollars of ultimately members' money spent doing changes to comply with MySuper and I really question the value," he said.

Cahill suggested the accommodation of MySuper had added substantial costs to what had been a low-cost fund environment.

"MySuper's been a wonderful exercise for us in that we were one of the lowest cost funds in the country before it started and all it's done is add costs to us," he said.

"I think we were in one of the surveys around second or third, so for us we haven't changed our basic default product one bit. It's added the incremental costs Russell alluded to. I've just about burnt out two compliance people in getting ready for it.

"We've spent, I've got the numbers but I'm almost scared to say it, quite a deal of money on getting ready for a MySuper world post-1 July, and if you boil it down to the purest form, to our members the net benefit has been additional cost," Cahill said.

"They [the members] haven't got a different product. There's probably a stronger compliance regime around it but at the absolute raw coalface, and we might be a unique fund in that situation, we probably are, all we've done is manage to raise our costs," he said.