Dud super funds vow to do better
THE new manager of some of Australia’s worst super funds has told hundreds of thousands of long-suffering account holders that if his company can’t do better they should leave.
Australian financial services company IOOF is in the process of taking control of ANZ’s $47 billion worth of pensions and investments, including products widely regarded as the biggest duds on the market.
Stockspot, which publishes the Fat Cat Funds Report, recently named ANZ as the fat- test fund manager in the nation — for the fourth year running. Stockspot founder Chris Brycki is particularly critical of ANZ’s OnePath range.
“The two factors that matter most when it comes to investment performance is what assets the fund invests in and how much the fund charges in fees,” Mr Brycki said. “Year after year we see the same suite of OnePath funds making up a large number of the Fat Cat Funds category because they charge excessively high fees relative to other products on the market.”
“ANZ’s sale … to IOOF could herald a reduction in fees if IOOF has the decency to do what’s right for investors in these funds,” he said.
“They have a choice to do what’s right or do what the banks have been doing for years — continue to profit at the expense of Australians’ retirement.”
ANZ’s head of superannuation Mark Pankhurst said it only won Stockspot’s fattest fund every year because ANZ named its funds in a way that generated duplications. And the listed fees were much higher than customers actually paid. That made net returns look lower than they really were. “I have to win it because of those things,” Mr Pankhurst said.
Still, ANZ has recognised many of its products weren’t up to scratch. Since 2014, it has shifted $7 billion of super owned by 240,000 customers out of expensive, poor-performing products at a bottomline cost of $100 million.
Mr Pankhurst denied the ANZ portfolio was a dud.
“If it was so crap, IOOF wouldn’t have bought it,” he said. ANZ was only selling because, like other banks, it had decided wealth management wasn’t its bread and butter, he said.