Only eight of 45 super funds received a “tick” designation from the Epic Retirement Institute in its latest assessment of retirement offerings, but the research firm that carries them out says the standard of funds’ retirement offerings is nevertheless improving overall.
Of the initial pool of eligible funds, about a third, or 15 funds, were not assessed because they were unwilling or unable to provide the information needed for a full assessment, or not offering even basic retirement solutions.
“Generally, it’s the engagement side, if they’re not doing much to engage members around retirement with financial advice, calculators, digital advice, or some other things,” Ian Fryer, general manager of Chant West, which conducts the “Epic Retirement Tick” fund assessments for the institute, tells Professional Planner.
“But [it’s] also product stuff, like if they’re not offering a retirement bonus, if their fees are high, if the performance isn’t great, if they don’t have a lifetime product, et cetera.”
The number of criteria in the tick assessment increased from 18 to 20 in 2026, organised into the broad areas of product design and investments; education, guidance and advice; and service delivery. Of the 30 funds that made it through the initial filter, 22 failed on more than six of the criteria and missed out on a tick.
The intent of the assessment is to encourage better performance across the sector not by focusing on its poorest performers, but by focusing on its best performers and holding them up as exemplars.
In many respects, the Epic Tick assessment is doing a job the joint superannuation regulators, APRA and ASIC, can’t, or won’t. Both regulators routinely talk about the leaders and laggards in the retirement space, point out the shortcomings in their offerings, and question the commitment of fund trustees to delivering on their Retirement Income Covenant obligations.
The Epic Retirement tick identifies the leaders so, by inference, every other fund is a laggard. “Everyone knows who’s not there,” Fryer says.
He says the tick assessment is “not just Treasury with some with some best practice principles, which I think are really good, but the question there is, well, if we don’t do it, what’s the consequence?”.
“Here, if you don’t do some of this stuff, then the consequence could be that your competitors are highlighted and you’re not.
“We want to have it as a positive piece, but we know that the other funds are thinking, ‘Oh, this isn’t good because we’re not there’. That’s a good thing, because that’s going to push them.”
The next phase in the project is for Chant West to present a “report card” to each fund, to “show them which ticks they got, which ones they didn’t, and why we gave them the tick and why we didn’t”, Fryer says.
Withholding a tick has galvanised many funds to lift their game by strengthening the internal business case for treating retirement income solutions more seriously, he says.
“There were some funds that were a bit annoyed with us when they didn’t get the overall tick last year. But when we went to them, went through that, they said, ‘oh my goodness, this is so helpful, it shows us exactly what we need to do to get the tick’.
“Ultimately, getting the tick is [by] meeting criteria which is going to make it better for their members. They were able to take that report card back to the business and say this provides us the rationale about why we need to do a whole bunch of stuff, and that’s been, I think, one of the helpful pieces of actually getting stuff done this year.”
Fryer says that last year only a few funds offered members a retirement bonus, but his year the majority do.
“Another change was that most funds have previously just had a calculator that works for someone leading up to retirement, but now the majority of them have a calculator for someone who’s already in retirement and just wanting to know ‘How am I going?’,” he says.
“A lot of funds are now putting more, but also better, education on their website, moving towards dedicated retirement hubs, retirement education hubs, with a lot more information on there, a lot better presented. Rather than just a whole bunch of text, there’s a lot more videos, charts, tables that tell the story much more effectively. Some funds are now moving towards within that having a section dedicated to the Age Pension.”
Fryer says the changes funds are making go well beyond the cosmetic. At the Conexus Retirement Leaders Summit in August, it was clear the conversation among funds’ retirement heads funds had moved on from solving the retirement income issue with product to focusing on the member experience of moving from accumulation to decumulation.
“We’ve seen hard evidence of that this year,” Fryer says. “It is really happening, it’s not just a cosmetic, ‘Oh, we’ve got to have some retirement education’. No, [it’s] ‘We’ve got to work out what do our members need to know, and we’ve got to have that on a website and provide it in different ways, different formats, different channels, because that’s what our members need’.
“It’s not just like ticking a box, it’s providing them what they need to make good decisions, to make the most of the money that’s saved.”
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