The Stronger Super draft legislation on the data standards for superannuation payments places mandatory requirements only on super entities and employers, leaving intermediaries out of the regulatory framework.
"This is a really important decision to make," IQ Business Group chief executive Graham Sammells said.
"It is quite clear that neither APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) nor the ATO (Australian Taxation Office) want to regulate all of the intermediaries in the system.
"I think that is fair enough, but it is important to understand that the obligation to be compliant rests entirely with the employer, at the start of the exercise, and what they call the superannuation entity, the trustees, at the end. And there are penalties for non-compliance."
The government last Friday released the draft legislation, which proposes an amendment to the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act to provide the tax commissioner with the ability to issue mandatory superannuation data and payment standards.
The schedule also introduces a new penalty framework to ensure employers and trustees of superannuation entities comply with the superannuation data and payment standards.
Sammells also noted the draft legislation marked the first time the government had committed to making the new data standards mandatory.
"It is also the first time to see the word mandatory in ink," he said.
Bravura global head of product Darren Stevens said the draft legislation lacked any technical information, which meant super funds and employers would be unable to make a start on the implementation of the regulations.
"The draft is silent on the delivery of messages between the parties," Stevens said.
"This is important because without understanding the delivery mechanism, funds are not able to put in place the infrastructure."
SuperStream builds largely on the work of the swimEC, which had developed data standards before.
But Stevens said the size of the XPRL messages was large and would mean many clients would have to invest heavily in infrastructure.
He also said it was important to know the requirements around how messages were going to be processed.
"Clients need to understand the life cycle of the messages; not just the sending and receiving of messages, but also what data is used where, how messages are split, how to track it and confirm whether the data is put in the right spot," he said.
GBST head of wealth management products Damien Dipietro said clients needed to start estimating the impact of SuperStream as turnaround times were going to be short.
"We have a very active user group; a forum within our clients. They are meeting monthly at the moment to discuss upcoming reforms and SuperStream is definitely a key part of that discussion in terms of what the potential outcome will be and what it will look like," Dipietro said.
"The turnaround times are usually quite short, so you have to be proactive to implement things in a timely manner."
GBST is already making adjustments to its flagship software, Composer, and will launch new capabilities in May.
"We are already starting to roll out some functionality within our next release," Dipietro said.
"We are going to be releasing some TFN (tax file number) search capabilities within our software. So we are already going down that road with our clients.
"That is really the first release of that capability. We are going to build out a lot more during the year as more detail and more certainty gets [released]."
