A message for members

The trust you place in us to help grow and manage your retirement savings bestows us with a great responsibility. But it’s one we embrace fully because we know how hard you have worked to build them and what a difference this can make to your future.

When investing your savings on your behalf, we manage investment risks and opportunities to provide you with strong investment returns*, as well as advocate and engage on issues that may affect the sustainability and performance of your savings. This focus, along with providing you with products and services that deliver value and low fees^, ensures you get the retirement you deserve.

You’re in a top-performing fund

The fund ended the year well, despite ongoing market fluctuations caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and volatility in global markets.

Our default My Super Growth and Balanced Growth options delivered positive investment returns of 9.1% and 5.6% respectively for the 6 months to 31 December 2020. Both options are top-ten performers over 3, 5 and 10 years*, placing us in the top quartile compared to other similar super funds.

Doing well and doing good

Part of providing you with strong, long-term returns* means ensuring those returns are sustainable. One of the ways we do this, is by actively monitoring and engaging with the companies we invest in - in order to influence positive change in areas such as climate change, worker safety, diversity, and conduct and culture. Indeed, our research indicates that companies that rate well on conduct and culture metrics, such as staff turnover and absenteeism, outperform those that don’t.

We also invest in renewables and set clear emissions targets, in order to mitigate the long-term risks that climate change poses to our investment portfolio.

Coming up in 2021

You can look forward to a number of new developments this year. In particular, I’m excited to announce enhancements to our default MySuper Lifecycle investment approach that will see an increased tailoring in our default investment options, to more closely match your life stage and investment horizon.

Why have we done this? The simple answer is that your age and stage of life should influence how to invest your super. When you’re young and looking to grow your savings, investing for growth can boost your savings, when there’s time to ride out market ups and downs. While you take on more risk, it’s a risk worth taking to maximise returns. And as you move through life and towards retirement, it becomes more important to manage the balance between risk and return. This helps safeguard the savings you’ve worked so hard to build, so that there’s more for you to enjoy in retirement.

Our performance track record, especially over the long-term, is something we’re incredibly proud of, because it means your retirement savings are growing.

More for members

We know how important it is for you to feel confident and in control when it comes to your financial future and we offer an extensive range of guidance and advice services. This year, we’ll be expanding our webinar series (giving you a choice between face-to-face seminars and online education) and reopening our local regional offices. Of course, you can also make face-to-face advice appointments, or if you’d prefer, video-conference meetings from the comfort of your own home. Our online retirement projection tool, explorer, is also available to help you track your retirement goals.

2021 also promises to bring some great new features to the Aware Super mobile app#, including viewing the unit prices of your investment option and tracking its performance. You’ll also be able to book advice appointments, access your account and member numbers more easily, and if you make a contribution, your bank details are saved so you can more easily make future contributions. We look forward to keeping you posted as these improvements are finalised.

And finally, while we don’t exist to win awards, we were delighted with the news late last year that we’d been awarded Best Super Fund 2021 and Best Moderate Super Product 2021 in Money Magazine’s Best of the Best Awards. You can take comfort in knowing you’re with a fund that works hard to do its best for members – giving you strong investment performance, low fees and excellent products and services, to help you achieve your best possible retirement.