Gullone warns against standardising any flawed processes, singling out the proverbial ‘scrawl on a beer coaster with a cheque attached’ from the small employer, which is currently “nursed through the system with costly remedial activity by the administrator…If the Super Clearing House becomes the primary conduit for contributions, it cannot be expected to work seamlessly or with a useful degree of automation with the many input and process variations that exist today.

The benefits are more efficient administration, lower unallocated pools, fee restraint and fewer queries – it’s worth it.” Most talk of a super clearing house has so far focussed on the employer-facing SG contributions process, but executive director of straight-through processing (STP) specialists Bluedoor Technologies, Karen De Angelis, says this opportunity should be grasped to increase automation on all fronts.

She suggests the clearing house should become the repository for choice of fund elections, and should also be the place that employers can send details of new entrants to the superannuation world, as well as details of voluntary contributions. She also asks whether “product providers should be insisting that employers, members and advisers use online services to submit their contribution returns and new entrant data…rather than focus on contributions only, product providers should transition all transactions to the internet, significantly reducing the number of admin staff required to process all transactions,she says, adding that employers who are already able to transact directly with their funds on an online/STP basis should be allowed to continue to do so.

De Angelis says the work SWIFT is doing with the funds management industry (including Bluedoor) on managed funds transactions may point the way forward. “The use of XML data packets as the method of data transfer is the most likely and widely used method of communication…[if] transactions from the clearing house to all super funds were common across the industry, it may provide further data streamlining opportunities, because files will be received in the correct format and can simply be loaded directly into the administrator’s database with no manual intervention.”

However nobody is pretending that the formation of a clearing house will be easy. As Citistreet said in its white paper, “there are many questions around the degree of change required, ownership stakes, governance of the new entity, technology platforms, people considerations, business principles and operating models to be resolved before reform starts. Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia chief executive, Pauline Vamos, supports a clearing house (while observing that standardised connections among major stakeholders could also work) but asks what is literally the million-dollar question – “The big issue is who’s going to pay for it up-front – the super funds don’t want to pay for it, the employers don’t want to pay for it.”