APRA publishes Chair Wayne Byres' speech on superannuation member outcomes

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has published a speech delivered today by Chair Wayne Byres on APRA’s efforts to achieve better outcomes for superannuation members.

 

In Driving better member outcomes, Mr Byres described the steps APRA is taking to better hold trustees to account for their performance, and the outcomes they deliver to their members.

 

Mr Byres’ comments included:

• “The [new] legislation and standards provide a strong platform for APRA to drive a much more intense focus on member outcomes. It will inevitably produce some difficult discussions with trustees who are not delivering for their members – put very bluntly, are you going to get better or get out? – but all have had fair warning given the increased attention on this issue in recent years.”
  
   
• “We will be … shortly kicking off consultation on a major overhaul of the superannuation data reporting regime. This overhaul aims to provide greater coverage, more granularity, enhanced consistency and better quality data. Inevitably, an overhaul of data collections of this order of magnitude will lead to cries of complaint from the industry. But the current data collection has been deemed insufficient, so the status quo is not an option.”
  
   
• “Later this year, starting with MySuper products, we plan to publish a selected set of performance-related measures and benchmarks. No doubt there will be fierce complaints – particularly from those at the wrong end of the scale – that the data is wrong, the metrics we use are wrong, or that the benchmarks we choose are wrong. Our view is: let’s have the debate.”

The full speech is published on the APRA website at APRA Chair Wayne Byres - Speech to the Gilbert + Tobin Conversation Boardroom event.