The major legal and operational aspects of merging TWUSUPER and Mine Super to create Team Super are all but completed, and as chief executive Vasyl Nair plots the course ahead he raises the “Ship of Theseus” philosophical question: If a ship has had every plank on it replaced, is it really still the same ship?
“We’ve done so much over the last four years, and so much thought went into the creation of Team Super, we’re effectively the Ship of Theseus, where every plank has been replaced,” Nair says.
“We’ve changed. Team Super has a new administrator, it has a new administration platform. It has a new custodian. It has a new brand. It has a new default insurance offering. It’s got a new lifecycle product. We were able to bring best of breed of both funds, while also reaching into market to select vendors we thought were best suited for our membership.”
Nair says the merger has already “delivered significant scale benefits to the members, and it has delivered significant scale benefits to the fund”, and there is more to come.
“We’re in a planning phase right now, post-merger, in order to make sure that we leverage the benefits of that scale,” he says.
Nair says a focus of the fund – led by co-chairs Nick Sherry (formerly TWUSUPER chair) and Christina Langby (formerly Mine Super chair) – over the coming year will be on “cohesiveness”.
“It’s really important to make sure that the new combined membership experiences the fund in a cohesive way, with a cogent narrative,” he says.
“We’ve undertaken quite a significant change to the structures of our collective fund over the recent period. There is an opportunity to bed this down, and we need to make sure we take that opportunity. You don’t merge often, and we want to make sure that we get it right.”
Nair says the 150,000-member, $22 billion Team Super has members employed in “some really important industries” like transport, energy, mining, logistics and aviation . He says its expanded membership is more diverse, “just given the number of industries and sectors that it covers”, and the geographical spread of its membership has expanded.
Benefits of greater scale
Nair says that greater scale means the fund has been able to reduce its administration fees and insurance premiums, and increase both the level and breadth of services it’s providing to members, and at the same time invest in internal resources to support cost-effective delivery of services.
Those additional services include “a number of digital journeys we’ve been able to implement that we didn’t have – at the very least on the Mine Super side – heading to the merger”, Nair says.
“We’ve been able to broaden the executive team and bring in capability like [chief retirement officer] Sarah Forman; and Mario Garrido, new chief growth officer,” he says.
“There’s more of a focus on some of our key stakeholder relationships.”
Nair says every decision on appropriate service vendors was closely co-ordinated between Mine Super and TWUSUPER. Mine Super was internally administered pre-merger, and Nair says part of the merger strategy was to gain greater control over those of its operations where it believed it could add value to members, and to find partners that could do that better than the fund had itself.
The administrator of the combined fund is SS&C, which has also partnered with retail super provider Insignia Financial to deliver administration services. Nair says that “Team Super members only benefit from SS&C’s increased scale”.
“They are quite a significant organisation globally,” he says. “Our members get the benefit of their global scale, and we see that each and every day.”
TAL got the nod as insurance provider for the merged entity and Team Super took on State Street as custodian.
Nair says the investment teams and investment committees of both funds “worked well together in the lead up to the merger”. Post-merger the team is led by former Mine Super chief investment officer Seamus Collins, backed up by former TWUSUPER CIO Edward Smith as deputy. Team Super’s assets are managed externally.
“From my perspective, the manager lineup is settled,” Nair says.
“But, just given the extraordinary times that we’re in, that’s a difficult question to answer.”
Nair says Team Super has “a very capable investments team” and has not yet considered the issue of internalising investment management.
“The journey that we’re on right now is making sure that we have the right lineup; that those managers are performing well, in line with expectations; and that we’re meeting the expectations from a regulatory perspective,” he says.
“A lot of the focus is on resilience. A maturation of our investment capabilities is the focus right now.”
The role of superannuation
Nair says recognising the role superannuation plays in the working lives and retirements of the fund’s members has guided decisions at each step of the merger.
“Every fund is an important part of a very important industry,” he says.
“Having the opportunity to continue to demonstrate to our membership that we should be looking after their retirement savings is really important, and the merger has brought together two complementary sets of capabilities that enables Team Super to go farther than either of Mine Super [or] TWUSUPER ever could. That’s what’s exciting.”
Nair says that with the merger effectively finalised, “we’re now well on our way from an execution perspective… of both our organic and our inorganic growth plans”.
“It’s really about, over the shorter term, cohesiveness and fluency and building that up, top to bottom across the organisation, so the membership can experience that, and then moving out of our planning phase into what I would describe as our growth phase, into our expansionary phase of the fund, which is appropriate levels of resourcing, excellent levels of service for the membership, and a real maturation of the fund in within the industry,” he says.
“You had two really important funds with very long histories come together and the merger date was not the end, it was the beginning. It really represents the jumping off point for Team Super its members.”
