AIST executive manager of policy and research David Haynes said APRA’s interim Quarterly MySuper Statistics report left the industry “in the dark” about what fees are charged on accounts that are not in the “MySuper environment”.
“Until the industry has a better idea of the fees charged on these default accounts, we won’t be able to fully assess the extent [to which] they are inflating the level of fees paid by unsuspecting fund members,” Mr Haynes said.
The superannuation trustees lobby group further emphasised its desire to have members of default funds rolled into MySuper earlier than the final transition date of 30 June 2017.
“While recently-released APRA data confirms that there are $359 billion of savings currently in MySuper products, the lion’s share of this money is invested in good-value, high-performing not-for-profit funds,” a statement from AIST said.
“By contrast, just $13 billion of savings in bank-owned and other retail funds has been transferred to the MySuper space,” the statement said.
Mr Hayne added that while there was a wide range of fees and costs across MySuper funds, the fees charged by non-MySuper default funds were “likely to be significantly higher” on average.
“In a compulsory super system such as ours, we don’t think it is fair that some members of default funds should have to wait nearly three more years to benefit from fee reductions,” Mr Haynes said.
