NGS Super gets ahead of DBFO in member advice design

Since May this year, a new digital advice service set up by the $18 billion profit-to-member super fund NGS Super has attracted about 45,000 page views and successfully engaged a significant cohort of younger members.

NGS’s Virtual Adviser service joins up with its existing intra-fund, phone-based and comprehensive advice. Natalie Previtera, chief executive of NGS Super, says the digital service has been “a really effective triage tool”.

“We’ve got some statements of advice that are going through, but the power of it is more when we are doing the referrals over to our phone advisers, or our comprehensive advisers,” she says.

“Almost 60 per cent were referred to phone advisers. They’re massive numbers for us. And the other thing that’s really interesting there too [is] you think that there’s a particular demographic using this that are well into retirement, or very close to, but a lot of people are under 60, and… nearly 20 per cent of them were under 40.”

Previtera says “a lot of people are hungry for this type of tool and type of assistance, and I’ve got theories about why”, which include the current cost-of-living crisis and younger members being priced out of residential property markets.

“Awareness of super is going through the roof with our younger members because they want to nurture it,” she says.

Previtera says members are mainly using the digital service to explore whether they’re making the most of their super, which opens the door to conversations on topics such as contributions and investment choices.

Added resources

As a result of the popularity and referral rate of the digital advice service, NGS has been forced to add phone advice resources to keep call waiting times reasonable.

Previtera says NGS Super’s advice offering has been built ahead of any changes that might flow from the proposed Delivering Better Financial Outcomes (DBFO) reforms, including the introduction of the so-called new class of adviser and changes to the adviser’s best interests duty to make it simpler to deliver limited or scoped advice.

These moves could bring “clarity” to super funds’ advice offerings, but would not fundamentally affect the structure of what NGS has already created.

“I’m not at all concerned about the structure because I’ve got the structure set up,” she says.

“My position is once we have the clarity around… those changes going through and being enacted, we’ll do some tinkering.

“It’s really just the clarity of we’ve built something [so] how does it have to change? It’s not a fundamental start from the bottom. It’s a bit more of a renovation. It’s a bit more of a moving furniture around.”

Previtera says the board of NGS “is very finely attuned to the needs of the membership”, which made gaining approval for the advice offering relatively straightforward, even in the face of DBFO uncertainty.

“I think it really comes down to an attitude of the most important thing we’re doing here is addressing the [member] need,” she says.

Cohorts and referrals

NGS will inevitably create member cohorts and have to refer members between the appropriate advice channels, but Previtera says its aim is to “go and do the gymnastics behind the scenes, and we want [advice] to be as seamless as possible for our members”.

“I spoke last year at the [Financial Services Council retirement] conference as a bit of a, I don’t know, interesting kind of left-field speaker,” she says.

“I was on a panel, and there was a lot of discussion around hyper-personalisation, and those things are all fine. But as I was listening to that, I’m just thinking, members need help now. They can’t wait.”

Previtera says the fund’s aim is to empower members to retire with confidence, and it has hired Nick Callil, formerly head of retirement solutions at WTW, to oversee development of its retirement income strategy.

“Nick’s focus right now is coming in and doing a bit of a lay of the land and seeing how our formal strategy sits and how that then connects to the work we’re doing here on the advice side of things,” she says.

“We threw him straight into the fry pan with a review of the retirement income strategy. That work is progressing really nicely.”

NGS is working with Challenger on an inflation-linked lifetime income product, which has been “a bit delayed, unfortunately, because you want to try and get the tech part of it humming, but it will be up and running before the end of the year”.

“We have no expectation that people are going to put their whole savings into that. I think it will be like little sleeves,” she says.

“We’re very committed to keeping things simple and thinking about that psychological element of how do I just lock this away and make sure I’ve got a sleeve of rent money or a sleeve of grocery money for my lifetime?”