MLC Super has launched a retirement income solution into the increasingly competitive retirement market but is rolling it out through its advised channel first before an expected expansion to master trust members.

“We see retirement income as essential to the purpose of super and we do think the industry has focused a lot on the accumulation phase and really treated the accumulation phase and the decumulation phase as quite separate products and separate phases of the super journey,” Ashton Jones, director of customer innovation at MLC parent company Insignia Financial, tells Investment Magazine.

“We wanted to bring retirement income back into the core focus and purpose of super, because over the next decade there’s going to be quite a profound shift in the Australian economy and superannuation itself, with more than three million Australians retiring over the next decade.”

MLC Retirement Boost might be better described as a product for retirement rather than a retirement product: members can use it from their very first super contribution, and it takes advantage of the 2017 Innovative Superannuation Income Streams regulations, which gave the industry “more flexibility around how they could build and deliver retirement solutions to their members”.

The product is comparable to AMP’s MyNorth Deferred Lifetime Income account, which allows members to “accumulate wealth tax-free”, though MLC thinks their offering will be cheaper and benefit from a collaboration with TAL and Challenger on a “Centre of Excellence” that will underpin the Retirement Boost offering, including through distribution capability and support on the Challenger side and adviser tools from TAL, which will also be the insurer of the pension phase of Retirement Boost.

“The super component operates the same as a standard superannuation account, but it’s treated differently from an age pension entitlement perspective,” Jone says. “What that means is you can build up quite a significant benefit that you can access at retirement, but you can build up that benefit from your first contribution into super.”

Insignia has recently pivoted to revive the consumer-facing MLC brand, which comprises superannuation, adviser-facing platforms and asset management businesses, largely inherited from the megamerger between IOOF, NAB/MLC and ANZ OnePath.

While other funds have focused on adding retirement products to their direct-to-member investment menus, Jones says that Retirement Boost is initially slated to sit on the MLC Expand platform before being rolled out to members of the MLC master trust business – putting advisers in the hot seat at a time when it’s becoming increasingly clear that they are key to the retirement ambitions of super funds.

The Conexus Institute’s 2025 State of Super report found that retail platforms dominated competitive inflows due to their relationships with advisers, and that those platforms require new members to offset their aging member profiles. According to the report, Insignia encountered a “meaningful deterioration” in competitive super flows in FY24 by nearly $2 billion to net outflows of nearly $6 billion, “leaving them as a clear laggard in terms of competitive flows”.

Advisers play a “critical role in retirement planning and delivering high quality retirement advice”, Jones says.

“So we see retirement as really the intersection of a few important capabilities for super funds, product advice, member engagement and digital experience.”

“And in that context, we felt that the best place for us to start Retirement Boost was in Expand… But we are thinking about the full roadmap and we’re thinking about both Expand and master trust.”

It all represents the culmination of about nine months of hard work, drawing on extensive member testing and feedback from Expand’s “adviser council”.

“From the adviser’s perspective, one of the key insights we had over 50 per cent of our Expand advisers were using or considering lifetime income solutions, but there were quite a lot of barriers, like the fact that they’re not well integrated on platforms today,” Jones said.

“It’s not easy to implement them, and while [advisers] can see the benefits of them, particularly from an Age Pension perspective, and giving confidence to spend, those barriers were limiting their take-up and consideration of the solution.

“From a member perspective, they said they’d more actively consider these types of solutions if they were embedded in something that was familiar to them. So rather than this being positioned as a completely separate product or solution, we wanted it to be an extension of things that they’re familiar with – like superannuation, or existing pension products.”