Qantas’ $9 billion corporate super fund plans to merge with Australian Retirement Trust, ending 85 years of management in a move that could soon leave ANZ with one of the few surviving standalone corporate funds in Australia.
The Qantas Super trustee board confirmed on Wednesday the two parties would merge, subject to signing a successor fund transfer deed and completing final assessments.
Qantas Super has managed the retirement savings of the airline’s employees for the past 85 years.Credit: Bloomberg
This masthead revealed in September the board was considering the future of Qantas Super, but the fund denied the report at the time.
Qantas Super, chaired by John Atkin, has been exclusively used by 26,000 Qantas employees and their spouses since 1939. Atkin said the merger was in the best financial interests of its members.
“Throughout the process of exploring merger options, Australian Retirement Trust has demonstrated its strong commitment to taking care of our members and their best financial interests,” he said.
Qantas Super manages about $9 billion in assets and has bounced back from three years of asset reduction during the pandemic. In 2022, total assets had shrunk by $472 million to $8.15 billion.
It outsources its administration services to Mercer, a major retail super fund. Mercer manages all Qantas Super’s member data, transaction processing and call centres.
Telstra’s $26 billion corporate fund announced in May it was considering merger options. This would leave ANZ as one of the very few remaining standalone corporate funds, down from 17 before the onset of COVID-19 and more than 500 in the early 2000s.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, which assesses the performance of super funds, has been calling for smaller funds to consider merging with bigger ones to improve efficiency for some time.
“We know that size and scale is an important feature of efficiency, performance, and lower fees,” the chair of the super fund watchdog Margaret Cole told the House of Representatives standing committee on economics in June.
The authority released its report card for superannuation products last month, which revealed about 64,000 accounts holding $4.2 billion in assets had underperformed against set benchmarks for fees.
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