Three of Brighter Super’s most popular investment options have achieved 10.6 per cent returns or more in the financial year to the end of June 2023.
The almost $30 billion fund’s Balanced and MySuper options both returned 10.6 per cent over the period while its Growth option returned 12.6 per cent.
According to chief executive Kate Farrar, the previous merger of LGIAsuper and Energy Super in 2021 to create Brighter Super, has enabled the fund to set members up for growth and make improvements in its investment capabilities.
CIO Mark Rider explains the fund has been overweight in listed equities, an asset class that witnessed strong recovery this year, relative to its major peers.
“The strong returns have been driven by the recovery in equity markets. Australian equities are up sharply over the past financial year and returns from international equities have been even stronger,” Rider said.
The fund’s infrastructure and credit portfolios also performed strongly.
“There has been a consistency across the performance of the fund,” Rider said.
“In addition to having the right bias in the portfolio towards listed equities and away from private equity, having solid performance across all asset classes, relative to the appropriate benchmark, supported performance versus our peers.”
He believes the merger to create Brighter Super, which brought it to over 120,000 members and some $22 billion in funds under management, had occurred at an “opportune” time.
Its latest merger at the end of May 2023 with Suncorp Super, now known as SPSL Master Trust, formed a $29 billion super fund with more than a quarter of a million members.
“I think it will give us the same opportunity there for us to review the investments that we have and make sure they are best in class for all of our members,” Rider said.
The super fund recently told Super Review that its first order of business after two mergers in two years was to “extract all the benefits” of having brought all these operations together.
“We’re making sure in our investment portfolio, where we brought the two MySuper sets of assets together, that we gain the great performance we expect out of having some liquidity from Suncorp Super MySuper, that we can put to use with what we expect to be some nice and cheap illiquid assets that can fall over time. There’s a big focus on bringing our asset portfolios together,” Farrar said.
“We also want to make sure we have rolled out our Brighter Super operating model across our entire member base and spend some time, now that everybody is on the single platform, to work further on our member journeys. We have 11 member journeys that are operating and want to ensure they’re fit for purpose and optimised for our new, expanded, and more diverse cohort.”
