Legislating message standards for superannuation contribution payments and a larger involvement of employers into the development of binding standards are the two main requirements to make a SuperStream system work. 

This is the conclusion of a draft report on the governance of SuperStream written by former chair of the Super System Review Jeremy Cooper, which he presented at the annual Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) conference in Adelaide yesterday.

"Everybody knows that the back office needs to be brought into the 21st century, so this is about the governing body that sits above the system," Cooper said. 

"My role was to assess: what do we need to do to get where we all want to be?" 

Cooper suggested the establishment of a new governance body that will set the message standards for electronic transactions in the superannuation industry. 

This body would build largely on the work done by the Superannuation Wealth and Investment Management Electronic Commerce (Swimec) council, which was established in 2002 to create a set of standards. 

"The key problem was that we couldn't bind all of the existing stakeholders to a binding standard," Cooper said. 

"It is always about incentives, otherwise employers are not keen to play ball," he said. 

The Swimec is made up of representatives of ASFA, the Financial Services Council, FPA, the Association of Payroll Specialists and the Australian Taxation Office. 

Cooper said that the new body would also have to include representatives of employers to help develop the standards. 

He said the development of binding standards could also be sped up by looking at the standards system developed by Medicare. 

ASFA chief executive Pauline Vamos said that the development of the standards was a key part of delivering a SuperStream system, and that the SuperStream system itself, along with the implementation of MySuper, was a key requirement for making the increase of the superannuation guarantee (SG) to 12 per cent a reality. 

"We have all heard Superannuation Minister Bill Shorten say yesterday that it is a quid pro quo," Vamos said.  

"The whole issue of getting the increase in SG is to get this done," she said.