Super funds need to mature beyond raw data: Empirics

Superannuation funds are yet to move beyond just collecting and integrating member data to predictive analysis modelling of member information, Empirics head Darrell Ludowyke said.

Speaking at the 2014 Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) Conference last week, Ludowyke said super funds are still stuck with raw and integrated data, and have not quite developed analytics maturity.

"Analytics maturity produces competitive advantage. The more you know, the more you can target your product," he said.

Ludowyke wants super funds to move into what he calls the train of thought analysis.

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"The ability for me to be able to just have a hypothesis and get an answer to that hypothesis, whether it's positive or negative, but do that in a very short period of time, in minutes," he said.

Super funds should look forwards instead of continuously looking backwards. While Ludowyke said it is great to know how many people rolled out or moved into pension products in the last three months, it is more useful to be able to anticipate who, and how many people are going to roll out in the next three, or six months.

Ludowyke also said members are largely having conversations around the super funds versus the self-managed super fund debate, rather than the super fund brand debate.

He wants to create personas around these members and look at where the battle is coming from.

"If you're a fund and we've got a large group of swinging voters in this channel, we don't want the SMSF guys to be winning the commitment battle," he said.

"It's not how big your data is, it's what you do with it that matters."