Peter Beck

Pillar Administration, the NSW Government-owned super member administrator, advertised separately for a chief operating officer and a head of sales and marketing but ended up with colleagues from a competitor.

The new COO is Gary Cox, who since November 2009 had been the director of member services at Russell Investments. Cox was head of super at BT Financial Group for two years before that, and prior to that spent five year at the helm of Citistreet Australia, the administrator run off a SunGard platform which is now the internal admin system for SunSuper.

Joining Cox at Pillar is Mark Blair, who will be the administrator’s new director of sales and marketing replacing Mark Luciano, who’s gone into business for himself.

Blair was most recently the director of strategic business initiatives at Russell. In a novel twist, Blair only last month had a big part to play in Russell winning the member admin contract for the 150,000-member Prime Super industry fund – and winning it away from Pillar.