Initial Thoughts at Future Fund Admin Forum 2024

Myles Allan
May 2024
Funds

Into day two of the Future of fund admin conference in Sydney. Some initial thoughts.

It turns out that while some things in Aus are definitely better such as Schweppes Bitter Lemon (unavailable in NZ) there are elements of our superannuation response we seem to have got right.

The retention inhouse of the levers of customer experience such as call centre seems to be a no brainer in NZ but have been routinely outsourced in the Aus model.

There has been a lot of discussion around how to enable better customer outcomes as the Aus industry moves toward a hybrid or “exploded’ operating model ostensibly leveraging best of breed outsourcing solutions still including customer facing functions.

It seems if you have a third party and the contractuals and cultural differential that generally entails between you and your customer it follows that issues can be harder and slower to fix – most importantly gaps between brand promise and brand delivery as well as resolution of systemic issues which carry both a regulatory interest and consequence.

And if that sounds suboptimal the US experience is significantly more problematic, subscale, fragmented, complex and seemingly slanted in favour of the employer as the fiduciary in the process. But apparently you can sue them if you are not getting the contracted outcomes, assuming you have the depth of pocket required.

My conclusions from a great synopsis from the US based panel.

So it seems we are not doing too badly on a number of fronts!

Always good to get over to Sydney and this event has given plenty of food for thought as well as mince pies and tom sauce from morning tea, washed down with Schweppes finest.