As financial services is dragged screaming towards the fee-for-service model, there’s been a lot of malice coming to the surface, not least that directed towards the industry funds, who are already largely there.
That ill-feeling might manifest itself in a cranky response to APRA’s whole-of-fund super performance sta- tistics, as useless as they admittedly are. Maybe it comes out less publicly, for instance by feeding an Australian jour- nalist an erroneous hatchet-job about the Conference of Major Super Funds, confident in the knowledge they won’t bother ringing to check the facts. (We know who you are, by the way.)
The industry funds give as good as they get, of course, whether it be through the AIST or other channels. But amid the crossfire, an emerg- ing area of universal agreement seems to be that group insurance through industry funds is pretty damned good value.
Whether or not advisers would come out and say so, there is anecdotal evidence they are parking at least a little of their clients’ nest eggs into industry funds, for no other reason than to exploit the generous accessibil- ity and pricing of the group insurance offer. Certainly I’ve spoken to accoun- tants who happily admit this is a key part of the process they go through in setting up an SMSF for someone.
The growing popularity does not mean there isn’t room for improvement in the industry fund group insurance space, as members of the Industry Fund Forum (IFF) readily admit in our latest roundtable.
It takes funds an average 160 days to finalise total permanent disablement claims, for example, and that’s on top of the standard six-month waiting period.
Claims related to mental illness have been particularly problematic in a group insurance context, and the roundtable makes clear that too many of these have been ending up in the Super Complaints Tribunal.
The IFF’s ‘Superfriend’ initiative is doing all it can to help, by promoting understanding of mental health issues among funds, their employers and members. It is also developing a code of practice for mental illness claims processing and underwriting, which extends the IFSA code to which insur-
ers are already signatories, by acknowl- edging member administrators as a big part of the picture.
