Issue 552, 9 December 2014
In this issue:
- Relief from sending product dashboards with member statements extended
- ASFA-Veda Data Benchmark: September, 2014
Relief from sending product dashboards with member statements extended
ASIC has provided a further six month’s conditional relief from the requirement that trustees must include product dashboards with members’ periodic statements.
Disclosure regulations introduced as part of the Stronger Super reforms required a trustee to include with a member’s periodic statement, including an exit statement, the latest product dashboard for the MySuper product or investment option(s) in which the member is invested.
While this requirement was originally due to commence from 31 December 2013, in Class Order 13/1534, ASIC provided relief so that a trustee would not be required to include the dashboard in a periodic statement for a reporting period ending before 1 January 2015, provided the trustee includes, in either the periodic statement or an accompanying document:
- a website address for the latest product dashboard for the investment option, and
- a statement to the effect that the latest product dashboard for the option can be found at that website address.
ASIC has now issued Class Order 14/1217, extending this relief to cover reporting periods ending before 1 July 2015.
ASFA-Veda Data Benchmark: September, 2014
ASFA recently assisted Veda with the production of the ninth edition (September, 2014) of the ASFA-Veda Data Benchmark (recently renamed from the ASFA-ITM Data Benchmark after ITM was acquired by Veda). The Benchmark was established in 2010 to track industry improvements and highlight the issue of data integrity across a number of areas.
Key points from the ninth edition include:
- the September 2014 Benchmark analysed over 3 million active members across 22 funds, 12 funds with under 90,000 members and 10 funds with over 90,000 members. 68 per cent of participating funds are self-administered funds
- at 89.4 per cent, the Benchmark indicates that almost 11 per cent of member records have important core data that is missing or incorrect
- when excluding errors in member beneficiaries, the Benchmark increased to 92 per cent
- this measure allows the comparison of Australian funds to United Kingdom (UK) funds. With the Benchmark finding Australian funds are not achieving the data quality standards set by the UK pensions regulator
- third party administrators and self-administered funds were comparable, with both now having 89.4 per cent of members with no data errors
- the data integrity of large funds (over 90,000 members) at 88.4 per cent was found to be below that of small-medium funds at 94.1 per cent
- measurement leads to improvement – seven funds in the current ASFA-Veda Data Benchmark, which have undertaken repeat audits, have improved their combined data quality from 87.4 to 90.1 per cent.
The Benchmark, which is updated twice a year, is available on the ASFA website.
