While many profit-to-member and industry funds have been shedding their members to retail platforms and SMSFs at a growing pace, Aware Super group executive for member growth Steve Travis says the fund’s investments in administration, advice and AI – and the way they’ve been received by consumers – are helping it turn the tide.

In FY24, the fund saw $680 million in assets walk out the door; in FY25, that number had shrunk to $400 million. Travis hoped that the fund would end FY26 “flat to slightly positive” on competitive flows; it instead wound up with a net rollover of $84 million out, which he attributes to a Federal Budget-induced spike in rollovers to SMSFs to get ahead of new borrowing rules.

“We see the trend continuing because it’s built on the strategic decisions we’ve made as a fund,” Travis tells Investment Magazine.

Those decisions include the move several years ago to bring administration in-house; investments in its financial advice proposition, which has seen it build out a significant team of “guidance advisers” and comprehensive financial planners, as well as digital advice capabilities; and strong branding. Travis sums all of this up, quoting from The Castle, as “the vibe”.

“The value proposition we’re putting into the market is resonating with members, and that proposition is that we can help guide them to their best retirement. We’ve definitely seen the proportion of new members in the 45-50 age range joining directly increase; it’s gone from about 10 per cent of our joins to over 30 per cent of our joins.”

Aware has invested in inorganic growth as well, picking up TelstraSuper in a successor fund transfer and, in early August, entering into an MoU with Prime Super to explore another. But Travis thinks the fund will increasingly play in the market for tightly-held corporate super mandates.

“The role of employers in super has declined over the years, but we still want to continue to invest in that area,” Travis says. “Our history has been in the public system: public education, public health. Our future is less in the public system and more in the care and service economies, and we think there’s opportunities to grow there through employers… there’s way more to go there in terms of maturing our direct acquisition engine.”

Still, Travis emphasis organic growth, saying that it’s the best way to win in the inorganic market and that Aware still has plenty more avenues to boost it: its soon-to-be-finalised lifetime income product, and the “substantial investment” it has already made in AI, with more to come.

“We expect to continue to attract efficiencies from the system and AI which should act like a flywheel – drive a better value proposition to the market, which drives scale, which allows us to lower fees, which improves the value proposition in the market. There’s a natural flywheel there when you’re growing in a scalable way, not just growth for the sake of growth.”