Superior and scalable technology was the deciding factor in Australian Ethical Super's choice of Russell Investments for administration services from March next year.
Australian Ethical Super chief executive Phillip Vernon said the fund would be able to give its 14,000 members more and newer services through a more competitive cost structure.
The move to Bravura's Superb and ultimately to Sonata "fits in with the business of generally improving the fund, its pricing, and making operations more robust", Vernon said.
The fund would move from the Acurity platform used by Pillar Administration to the Bravura platform, which Vernon described as "industry standard".
The competitive tender had five finalists, with Russell being chosen because "it was the most competitive in a weighted bundle of factors", he said.
"These included pricing, service, future platform and experience in the retail and adviser markets," he said.
Russell infrastructure managing director Siva Sivakumaran said the "key differentiator" was the ability to scale to Bravura's Sonata application suite, "which is the future for retail direct-contributions administration".
"It's the engagement with advisers which enables us to have a better interface with functions such as straight-through processing," Sivakumaran said.
"The adviser can move money around for the investor."
The partnership, which took more than eight months to complete after a highly competitive tender, will increase Russell's members under administration to 355,000.
