Following allegations by an adviser that Vision Super refused to work with his offshore assistant due their “non-Australian” accent, the fund has defended its position, which, it said, adheres with the law.
Posting on LinkedIn last week, Lifestyle Solutions Financial Planning adviser Daniel Boce detailed an experience with Vision Super, alleging the fund denied his Philippines-based administration assistant’s request for client information.
The adviser alleged that, when he called the fund to inquire into its policy and procedure for offshore calls, he was told that anyone calling up with a “non-Australian accent” would be denied client information.
Speaking with Super Review sister brand ifa, Boce said he was informed by the fund that accents are used among a number of other techniques to ensure a request is coming from Australia.
“He just said, ‘that’s just the way it is’. They think that Vision Super has a liability issue if they release information to an offshore facility that then gets hacked,” Boce said.
Financial advice firms are increasingly turning to outsourcing for their admin processes in order to, as Boce said, keep costs down and streamline their processes.
Having an adviser perform this admin, including making contact with a fund, would only drag out the process and defeat the purpose of hiring an assistant in the first place, he said.
“That’s why we have assistants, so that we can get these things done quicker,” Boce said.
On Vision Super’s side, the policy is simply tailored to meet the fund’s member privacy obligations.
“Vision Super is committed to complying with the Privacy Act 1988,” a spokesperson told ifa.
“Australian Privacy Principle (APP) 8 outlines that before disclosing personal information to an overseas recipient, reasonable steps must be taken to ensure that the recipient does not breach the APPs in relation to that information.
“To uphold these obligations, we have a standard operating procedure for all third-party authority (TPA) interactions.”
According to the fund, which merged with Active Super earlier this year and has around $30 billion in funds under management, the way it handles calls is not out of the ordinary and, put simply, it does not provide member information to anyone not within Australia.
“Our Member Services team must verify the identity of the caller, the member in question, and the caller’s location (onshore or offshore) for every inquiry. This is not based on an individual’s accent, the procedure is every call, every time,” they said.
“If a caller confirms they are located offshore, Vision Super requests that a member of their onshore team contact us to complete the account-related discussion.”
The Vision Super spokesperson said that the fund had seen instances of offshore team members pretending to be located in Australia to get around the policy; however, they did not suggest this was the case during the call with Boce’s assistant.
Additionally, while the spokesperson was adamant that accents don’t play a role in its offshore policy, they were unable to confirm or deny that this specific incident occurred.
Additionally, while the fund detailed the need to ensure member privacy, Boce said that there are a range of options other funds and platforms utilise that don’t impede the ability of advice practices to offshore some functions.
“BT Panorama, a couple others, require that if you’ve got offshore staff, they want a couple of signed forms confirming what they’ve got in place for security and all that sort of stuff,” he said.
“I’ve got no issue with that, because they’re not saying they’re not going to provide the information. They’re just wanting to confirm what security [the assistant] has on their machine and what the processes are.
“I think a couple other funds will only have a two-factor authentication go through to your phone. So, the PA might ring up, two-factor authentication goes through to your phone to confirm that it is actually you releasing it to your PA. Again, no issue with that all because not hindering, it’s protection. But [Vision] is just pure, no offshore.”
Security within the super fund sector has faced heightened scrutiny on the back of a spate of incidents in recent months. Namely, in early April, several big funds sounded the alarm after a surge of suspicious login attempts on their websites.
