ISA will change and continue with super ad campaign

Industry Super Australia (ISA) has made changes to its “Compare the Pair” adverts after concerns were raised by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) but has vowed they will continue despite efforts to stop the adverts airing. 

ISA stated that it would make changes to the adverts after ASIC raised concerns about what constituted an 'average’ retail or industry super fund and the size and make-up of the sample set of funds used to calculate the claims in the advertising. 

ISA chief executive David Whiteley stated ISA had worked co-operatively with ASIC to make the changes but claimed the need to do was as the result of a campaign by bank-owned funds “to avoid competition based on net investment returns”. 

“This campaign has also seen the banks lobby to reduce consumer protections in financial advice and introduce a 'free for all’ in default super where banks 'leverage’ their business-banking relationships to become the default super for employees,” he said.  

Whiteley stated that the advertising campaign, which had been running in various forms for nearly ten years, would now include spoken and written disclaimers and more prominent details of the retail super funds being compared to industry super funds.  

He also said ISA would continue to use the modelling provided by research agency SuperRatings which compares the average net performance of the 15 industry super funds within ISA and 63 retail super funds tracked by SuperRatings with a 10 year performance history.  

SuperRatings chief executive Nathan MacPhee said there was no selection bias in the choice of the 63 retail funds but that they all had a consistent 10 year return history.  

McPhee said the list of funds represented an expanded comparison set from 10 years ago when the original adverts compared 16 retail and industry funds.  

He also stated that ASIC had not questioned the modelling, which also covered one, three, five and seven year results, in any way.