MLC is in the early stages of consolidating the patchwork of group insurance arrangements it inherited during years of mergers and acquisitions by its parent company Insignia Financial and its predecessors. 

MLC Super chief executive Dave Woodall tells Investment Magazine he believes life insurance provided through super performs a unique social and economic function.  
 
“Insurance inside super is huge – it’s carrying a big load for society broadly,” says Woodall, who will speak on an industry CEO panel following Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino at the Investment Magazine Insurance in Super Summit. “It’s carrying a big load in terms of, let’s call it default cover, that frankly a lot of people would not seek or choose.” 

As he oversees the consolidation project, Woodall says he wants insurers tendering for MLC’s business to think beyond price to what he describes as the fund’s “three battlegrounds”: employers, direct to consumer and the advised ecosystem. 
 
The number of arrangements Woodall is dealing with is a direct artefact of how Insignia – which was formed by the mergers of IOOF, NAB Wealth and ANZ Wealth and relaunched its superannuation business under the revived MLC brand last year – was assembled.  
 
The MLC Super Fund, home to the MasterKey and Plum products, is insured by Acenda, the former MLC Life Insurance, which NAB spun out to Nippon Life in 2016 and which merged with Resolution Life Australasia in 2025. Meanwhile, the Retirement Portfolio Service, which houses the ANZ Smart Choice suite that came across with IOOF’s 2020 acquisition of ANZ’s pensions and investments business, is insured by Zurich – itself the inheritor of the OnePath Life book – while TAL sits on at least some tailored employer plans within the fund. 

It is understood all three insurers are eager to retain their slice and win the larger mandate once consolidation completes, with AIA Australia and MetLife also in the mix to challenge the incumbents.  
 
The modern-day Insignia’s complicated birth makes MLC Super a good case study for the question of whether group insurance design has kept pace with the members it’s meant to serve.  
 
Default deliberation  
 
The risk pool beneath the default product set has shifted significantly. While funds with historical member bases in specific industries have been better able to tailor their insurance cover, the superannuation system is increasingly defined by larger funds with broad cohorts of members and they need to be building in more flexibility at the individual level. 
 
“We’ve got to work with insurers around how you can get a higher level of tailoring available. It’s all very good for us to talk about averages in the system, but none of us are that average member. A 31-year-old might not be married and might not have kids, but another 31-year-old may well. You could have very, very different cohorts at what people still think are very young ages that don’t require a lot of cover.”  
 
To Woodall’s mind, the template for something better exists in MLC’s own corporate super book, where companies run bespoke insurance arrangements with multiple membership categories reflecting different job classifications and cover types. 
 
“If I go and speak to any of our top 20 employers, they’ve got bespoke arrangements with multiple categories reflecting the different job classifications and types of cover accordingly. Insurers are doing this for all of these major employers, and yet have more of a vanilla proposition for everybody else. It seems like there is some space in the middle there.” 
 
Trauma trajectory   
 
More of that changed risk pool also emerges from the fact that mental health conditions now account for a significant number of TPD claims, and most products were not built to accommodate them. TPD was designed around physical injury and permanence; psychological claims are more often “episodic”, with recovery possible. 
 
“Is TPD, which is a construct that was developed a long time ago, the right sort of structural product to deal with the mental health shift?” he asks. “When you talk to insurers about this, they get a bit uncomfortable.” 
 
I think we need the evolution of insurance design and products. There’s a few competing levers, but at the end of the day, mental health now is driving a lot of claims, and traditional TPD is probably not highly suitable in all cases.”  
 
But there’s an even larger problem to contend with, Woodall thinks, which is whether members have coverage at all. The Morrison government’s Putting Members’ Interests First reforms removed automatic cover from under-25s and low-balance accounts to stop premium erosion, and stapling then bolted those members to the fund that removed their cover. 
 
“We’ve got a fairly large cohort of people who are now uninsured. The policy intent of reducing erosion for low balance members was sound, but when you fast forward and combine it with stapling, we’ve ended up with a material cohort of people who don’t have cover and whose life circumstances have evolved. With the passage of time, things like this need to be reviewed.”  
 
The 24-year-old whose cover was switched off is now in their thirties, possibly with a mortgage and dependants, and still stapled to a fund that never turned the cover back – and that’s “not necessarily a top of mind matter” until claim time.  
 
“With the passage of time, things like this need to be reviewed.” 
 
While Woodall is alive to objections to that based on the sole purpose test – that super is for retirement income, not insurance – he thinks that it would be wrong to ignore the role of insurance in protecting members.  
 
“In 2026 and beyond, the system is doing the heavy work around insuring the population… whether that was intended, unintended, likely, predicted – it doesn’t really matter. It is what it is.” 

The Investment Magazine Insurance in Super Summit will be held at the InterContinental Double Bay in Sydney on July 21. Limited tickets are available to executives and employees of APRA-regulated super funds. For more information visit https://www.investmentmagazine.com.au/category/events/insurance-in-super-summit/2026-insurance-in-super-summit/#agenda

Aleks Vickovich is acting co-chief executive of Conexus Financial, publisher of Investment Magazine. Conexus founder and managing director Colin Tate AM is on long service leave.