NGS Super is on a mission to reduce its member churn with a bid to lean into its “alternative scale” as a small player in a superannuation landscape dominated by increasingly mammoth funds.

And chief executive of the $16 billion education industry fund Natalie Previtera says the fund is already seeing some early success. There has been a 25 per cent reduction in member churn in the six months to December 2025, compared to the same period in 2024 – churn is defined as the number of exiting members.

NGS Super is not alone in facing the problem of member departures. According to the 2026 State of Super report by The Conexus Institute*, NGS Super sits within the quadrant of super funds that have lower scale and sub-system flows and which also includes Team Super, Prime Super, BUSSQ and Legalsuper.

“The thing I see that goes through all of this [uplift for members] is one I have termed ‘alternative scale’. We’re not trying to be massive, and we’re not afraid of the size we are either,” Previtera tells Investment Magazine in an interview from the fund’s Sydney office.

“We actually want to use that as an advantage, whether it’s in the investment space where we structure to the size we are, where we find the tools and we find the people and their connections that will make that work, but it also informs the decisions we make when we are running the rest of the business.”

Previtera highlights the migration to Grow Inc as its external administrator as an example of the fund opting for a solution that fits its scale. Grow officially began servicing NGS Super’s members last November, but Previtera says the fund is still in “hyper care” mode.

“We think about it as the Ferrari of admin systems,” she says.

“We saw the value of Grow as being really streamlined, functional. We don’t try and tinker too much with what Grow is being set up to do.”

Grow offers straight-through processing and removes manual processes, but its allowance for data ownership by the fund is “groundbreaking”, Previtera says. It addresses a critical roadblock for the fund to improve its retirement income strategy by reclaiming member data from the administrator.

“Behind the scenes, things are happening really, really fast and in real time. It allows our staff, particularly our frontline staff if they’re on the phones or they’re in the CRMs, to see what’s happening and they can help members in real time,” she says.

Grow is a small player in a system dominated by providers with deep-pocketed corporate backers, such as MUFG Pension and Market Services. But Previtera has a lot of confidence in its potential.

“Nine years, some people will say it’s a long time for a company to be a startup, but we’re talking about something with high volumes, very low margin, and it takes a while for those things to actually break through,” she says.

“The system is changing, and we need to be investing in those things [like data ownership] going forward, because otherwise it’s going to stay the same. We’ll have a monopoly of really large players, and that doesn’t benefit members, that just benefits the shareholders of those really big players.”

The fund also wants to partner with Grow and trial out innovative solutions such as automation capabilities.

“What are the things NGS could potentially experiment with – because of our scale – that might mean they [Grow] can go and put it into production elsewhere, because we know we’re not a million members but at 115,000-odd members, that provides a nice little ecosystem to experiment with it. Our members benefit as well,” Previtera says.

NGS Super is among the diminishing number of mid-sized players as super funds of similar scale look to merge with equal-sized partners (such as CareSuper and Spirit Super) or link up with a bigger fund (such as TelstraSuper and Aware Super), but for Previtera the answer to whether NGS is considering mergers is a definitive no.

“I would put it out there that if anyone is looking for a merger partner, they’re very welcome to come and talk to us, but in terms of whether we’re considering merging up, absolutely not on the radar,” she says.

“Our fundamentals are really good, and there’s lots of reason to believe that will continue to be delivering for members well into the future.”

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