Multi-employer fund, equipsuper, has trumped the master trusts in an outsourcing war by recently winning over the super arrangements of three organisations: Origin Energy, the Edison Mission Energy Super Fund in Victoria and Abigroup.
The three wins have combined assets of around $130 million and over 2,000 members, and will bolster equipsuper’s assets to around $1.6 billion.
equipsuper general manager Ian Ramsay expects all the funds to be absorbed into equipsuper by the end of the first quarter of 2002.
equipsuper was originally born out the privatisation of the Victorian electricity industry in the 1990s, but was re-branded three years ago. According to Ramsay, the fund is unique in that it wasn’t born out of award-based super.
Giving it a competitive edge in recent tenders is the fact that it can handle defined benefit components and it has shown a strong investment performance over the past five years. The defined benefit fund has grown by 10.81 per cent a year over the past five years, while the accumulation growth option has shown an annual return of 10.75 per cent over the same period.
Ramsay says the fund will first bed down its recent wins before looking at further tender opportunities. The fund has aggressive growth plans, aimed at bolstering its economies of scale, but it wants to grow in a controlled way.
