SuperStream Advisory Council meeting
3 May 2013
Key messages
Network governance
The Council is aware of the impact and importance of issues critical to industry and is working towards the resolution of these. The Affiliation of Superannuation Practitioners (ASP) provided further briefing for the Council on the areas it is progressing.
The Council noted further collaboration between the industry associations towards finalisation of the interoperability agreement and associated standards (as a matter of priority) and finalisation of ongoing governance arrangements (with a draft Memorandum of Understanding between the industry associations receiving the endorsement of the respective boards).
The Council also noted increasing stakeholder representation in ASP. It considers that ongoing SuperStream governance arrangements should involve broad representation from industry stakeholders (including employers and self-managed superannuation funds) and key service providers (including administrators, accountants, and software providers).
The Council also noted that the industry associations had sought the involvement of the Australian Payments Clearing Association to provide further technical and other support during the development of the interoperability agreement, standards and governance arrangements.
The Council is developing a framework to:
- Define the needs of an ongoing governance body;
- Develop an expression of interest in respect to these needs; and
- Test for prospective providers of governance services.
The Council has sought complete transparency and regular reporting back to it on progress against the timetable, risks and issues.
Industry readiness
The Council noted a report from the first meeting of the Council’s Benchmarking and Performance subgroup, including its role, and the deadlines to which industry is working.
The Council also noted the intention of industry associations to survey readiness and suggested this could leverage off the work of the ATO and APRA. The ATO has received information in relation 78 per cent of funds through its fund readiness survey. Overall results suggest a good level of readiness at this point in the implementation cycle, with some significant outliers and areas requiring focused attention.
The Council noted further analysis of these results was required. However, it agreed that it was the responsibility of superannuation fund trustees to assess their fund’s readiness, and called on them to do so.
Contingency planning
The Council also noted that superannuation fund trustees were responsible for managing contingencies. Plans would include building redundancy and failsafe methods into processing and service design where possible, reverting to paper and manual processing for limited periods of time and being able to switch to alternative suppliers or areas for processing.