Diving into the biggest Super?Funds

In this article we take a look at the 2 biggest superannuation funds in Australia. To do this, we dive into SUPERtracker, the new analysis tool we’ve built that sources information from APRA and presents it in a way that trends can easily be explored.

To see which are the biggest funds (in terms of total assets), we go to the Profile option in the Analysis area of the app. We can see that as of 2022, the top funds were AustralianSuper and the newly formed ART (Australian Retirement Trust, the merger between Q Super and Sun Super).

First up here’s the total assets of AustralianSuper

and the total assets for ART

From there we can go to the Snapshots section (last of the menu options) and from the top of the menu, we can select AustralianSuper. This gives us the following snapshot.

Here’s what we can see

• there has been a steady growth in Total Assets.?
• In 2021, we can also see that the fund had a +19% return.?
• Employer Contributions grew to $13.3bn in 2022 as well, a bigger jump than in previous periods.
• Equity assets made up the majority of its fund structure being nearly 3x bigger than the next biggest asset type of Fixed Income.
• In terms of new accounts, 2022 was the biggest gain with 408k net new accounts.
• The make-up of the fund is more male than female with 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 year olds as the biggest cohorts

Next, we move to ART and we see the following

• a larger jump in funds occurred in 2022 going from $136bn to $247bn with the merger
• In 2021, we can also see that the fund had its best return in that recovery year but at 14%, this is lower than AusSuper did.
• Employer Contributions grew to $7bn in 2022 as well, just over half of AusSuper.
• Equity assets made up the majority of its funds but this was just over double of the next biggest asset class (Fixed Income).?
• In terms of new accounts, 2022 was the biggest gain with 1.6 million net new accounts (makes sense after a merger)
• There’s more parity between male and female members for ART but similar to AusSuper, 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 year olds are the biggest cohorts.

App

To access the app, users can go here: https://tinyurl.com/superannuationtracker

You can also read more about what else is in the app here: https://medium.com/notcentralised/digging-into-superannuation-with-supertracker-e4a36cf31b00