With markets showing some signs of recovery and the hint of green shoots starting to appear, the superannuation industry may finally be able to breathe a small sigh of relief.
However, for many industry pundits now is not the time to relax; instead the time is ripe to take a look at the way things have been done in the past and consider how they can be improved in the future.
At the recent Fund Executives Association Limited (FEAL) conference in Melbourne, Russell Investments managing director Chris Corneil provided some strong opinions on how superannuation funds invested money on behalf of members.
"I wonder whether the fixation on peer relative returns means we're designing products for our funds and not our members," Corneil said.
"As we compete for members, the penalties for underperforming peers are great and therefore we're [incentivised] to track the herd rather than run the risk of being an outlier."
He said the traditional notion of the default fund should be examined.
"Many of our members who were nearing retirement before the market crash were in default funds with 70-80 per cent equity allocations. We need to ask whether that's the best risk exposure for someone hoping to retire next year," he said.
"Intuitively it doesn't make sense that a 25 year old has the same exposure to someone about to turn 65."
Frontier Investment Consulting senior consultant Allison Hill said that so far superannuation funds had not been making asset allocation changes as a result of the appearance of green shoots.
"People are taking some signs of optimism, but there is still a sense of caution. I don't think people are making a lot of changes as there is still a lot of risk," Hill said.
However, there had been a re-weighting of equities in the past five months, she said.
"I think what Chris had to say at FEAL was really interesting and we could in the future see some changes of how you assess risk and liquidity," she said.
"But I don't think the outcome in asset allocation will be any different."
While Corneil said he believed it was critical to give fund members the tools to make informed financial decisions over asset allocations, "helping our members become their own CIO is a fruitless and somewhat irresponsible exercise".
Instead, he urged funds to look closely at the structure of their default funds.
"We know that 80 per cent of members choose the default option, so there will never be sufficient scale in target date funds to make them viable unless the industry moves to use them as the default option," he said.
So it seems that while funds are not making any grand moves as the market recovery continues, it may now be a good time to assess the old ways and perhaps come up with some real innovation.
