QSuper has been chosen as Pension Fund of the Year for the second year running at the Chant West | Conexus Finanical Super Fund of the Year awards.
QSuper was shortlisted alongside Asgard’s Infinity eWRAP Pension and Colonial First State’s FirstChoice product.
After accepting the award Rosemary Vilgan, chief executive of QSuper spoke about her fund’s drive to improve their pension offering, particularly as they had many members with large balances in retirement.
“In the past year, we’ve definitely focused on what our pension members have asked us to do, so we’ve innovated in the area of our actual pension product. Members can now pick what they want: inflation indexation, or regular payments, and then we also segregated $10 billion of pension assets into a separate investment pool, where we’ll be able to focus on tax consequences for retired people compared with people still in the workforce. There’s been innovation at the product and service end, but also at the big picture end,” she said.
Vilgan also listed the ways QSuper is getting members to think about retirement holistically. “We have comprehensive advice programs, comprehensive retirement seminars and calculators. It’s not just about balances, it’s about other considerations, like Centrelink, but also non-financial considerations like ‘what are you going to do with your time?’”
Warren Chant, director of Chant West, said: “QSuper is one of the few non-profit funds with significant scale in its pension division. It has pension assets of about $10 billion and 23,000 pension members. With this scale, it can devote significant resources to servicing pension members.”
He praised QSuper for an impressive pension conversion rate and noted its 2-day pre-retirement seminars covered many aspects of retirement.
