Australia’s profit-to-member funds are trying to attract and retain members through ever-increasing marketing expenditure when the data suggests retail platforms are winning flows by sharpening their focus on digital systems and adviser serviceability. 
 
Speaking at the Investment Magazine Chair Forum, CoreData global CEO Andrew Inwood said that the established profit-to-member funds are increasingly vulnerable to disruption from smaller retail platforms with a stronger digital orientation.  
 
“What happens when things get big and strong is the barbarians appear, and the barbarians want to evolve the industry and change it and offer new services,” Inwood said. “Everybody thinks the Gauls were some magical tribe with special abilities and better soldiers. No; they had steel swords. You turn up in a fight with a steel sword against a bronze sword and you’re going to win.”  
 
The ones building the steel swords, Inwood said, are the likes of HUB24, Netwealth, MLC, and smaller operations like Stake (chaired by Conexus Financial chair Geoff Lloyd).  
 
“They’re doing really interesting things in the way they’re building out their digital systems, and the people in that digital push aren’t coming from the traditional places,” Inwood said. “They’re coming from very empowered teams who have done really exciting things over the last 10 years, and if they pull this off and do what they did in their previous industry than this is going to be really interesting.”  
 
Those businesses “don’t have access to special powers” – or, Inwood reckons, a lot more capital – but they’re accessing new ideas and deploying them more rapidly as the market starts to shift in much the same way that profit-to-member funds did when retail super was dominant. They’re also underspending profit-to-member funds on marketing while – in many cases – enjoying above system growth from competitive switching.  
 
“A lot of the people in this room, frankly, used to be the barbarians in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and now they’re not,” Inwood said. “They’re the incumbents.”  
 
Inwood’s research follows the release of The Conexus Institute’s* 2026 State of Super report, which revealed that AustralianSuper had entered competitive outflow for the first time and that the majority of the funds experiencing high net competitive inflow rates were platforms that service financial advisers. 
 
Those findings called into question a “spend to defend” mindset at profit-to-member funds that has manifested in marketing activity, with The Conexus Institute researchers writing that they “could not develop any confidence that the increasing amount spent on brand, marketing and advertising is having any impact on competitive flows of the underlying funds”. 
 
Inwood also noted that the “barbarians” are in many ways doing a better job of servicing advisers, which CoreData found were driving about 70 per cent of switching activity and who members are mostly seeing as they either turn 55 or hot $300,000 in their super.   
 
“Working with super funds is interesting, there’s some brilliant people working there but sometimes you’re a bit confronted when you go and say your service isn’t going that well… have you looked at Google complaints or the Reddit thread on you?” Inwood said. 
 
“It’s pretty grim. There are two advisers right now live streaming trying to get death benefits or money out of AustralianSuper or ART and they’re updating it every day.”

*The Conexus Institute is a not-for-profit think-tank philanthropically funded by Conexus Financial, the publisher of Investment Magazine.