Information regarding the YourSuper comparison results

The ATO’s YourSuper Comparison Tool was updated on 31 August 2022 with the latest rankings for 69 MySuper funds. YourSuper has been designed to compare two specific aspects of superannuation funds: investment performance and fees. The update shows:

• PSSap returned 6.42% for the last eight years to 30 June 2022 (post fees, post tax).

• PSSap annual fees (for an account balance of at least $50k) have fallen significantly, at $544.

We appreciate that you may question these point-in-time results, however it is important to consider them in the context of our long-term objectives and investment strategy.

Understanding our approach—in a nutshell:

• We have chosen high quality assets for your portfolios—assets that are more sustainable and resilient to a higher-inflation, lower-growth environment.
• We have adopted a conservative policy to achieve equitable member outcomes during volatile markets. This can cause significant differentials in peer-relative returns in the short term, especially at arbitrary measurement points such as end-of -financial-year.
• Our focus on continuous improvement to provider customers best value for money means that structures we having been putting in place over the past six years are now flowing through to reduce investment costs.

Trust our track record for sustainable long-term results

Our primary aim is for your savings to be secure, as well as grow. Our investment strategy has been carefully designed to capture most of the gains as markets rise, but avoid more of the losses, on average, when markets fall compared to our peers¹. This is a distinguishing characteristic of our approach, versus our peers, because we understand that it isn’t the ups and downs that you experience along the journey, but the wealth you are able to accumulate and sustain in retirement that matters².

While this strategy serves our customers and aims to maximise their retirement income, it does mean we will not always be first on ranking charts or have the lowest fees. We are comfortable taking that approach because our primary goal is to ensure our customers have sufficient income when they retire.

Following years of record low interest rates, inflation and atypical share market returns, markets have been experiencing significant corrections towards more sustainable levels since the beginning of the 2022 calendar year. Geopolitical, economic and market conditions have led to negative returns from both global share and bond markets. This downturn is something we are prepared for, and as prices adjust to these lower levels, we expect to compare favourably, relative to peers.

Our investment returns for the 10 years to 30 June 2022, for the Default, Balanced and MySuper Balanced options across our schemes exceeded their objectives, notably throughout the dramatic falls in equity markets in March 2020, and the lower growth, high inflation market downturn in the first half of 2022³.

Our investment options (Balanced, Aggressive and Income-Focused) have also all outperformed the APRA annual performance test for the eight years, to 30 June 2022⁴.

We’re in it for the long haul

It’s important to remember the long term role of super. Your lifetime is the relevant investment horizon, not arbitrary reporting periods or timelines chosen to compare funds. If you have 15 years to retirement, comparing peer performance one, five, or 10 years to 31 August 2022 is less relevant than how much income you’ll have per year after you retire in 2037. This is why CSC seeks to build resilient investment portfolios using high quality assets, so that whenever you choose to retire, you are able to do so regardless of the strength of the current markets.

If you are close to retirement or your financial situation has changed significantly, please seek personal financial advice⁵.

Here’s what we’ve been doing­—anticipating future risks and opportunities

We believe returns should properly compensate for the risks to capital and the cost of accessing and administering the investment. We prefer this approach, as opposed to simply taking on more and more risk to capture higher—but less dependable and increasingly less certain­—returns.

1. Building more inflation-hedging into your savings.

   In 2021, we predicted that central banks would need to respond to inflation with larger-than-expected interest rate rises⁶. One way we responded to this was through our purchase of an interest in Amplitel, Australian wireless tower infrastructure asset that is co-owned with Telstra⁷. The returns from investments such as this one are more closely linked to movements in inflation.

2. Continuing to deploy capital selectively. This has increasingly been through co-investment across private equity opportunities.

   Our investments stand on their own financial merit and produce positive impact, such as healthcare innovations that are of benefit to wider society. We have invested in a business that created innovative medicine based on RiboNucleic Acid (RNA) technology. This medicine can safely halve LDL cholesterol in patients—a major risk factor of cardiovascular disease and a leading cause of death globally—with only two doses per year.

3. Continuing to build new investment management businesses.

   We identified, and partnered with, global best-practice investment talent to create new sources of investment returns. By seeding these new businesses early, we are able to share profits in the partnership. As these businesses continue to attract global clients and expand, the result is lower fees over time.

4. Integrated management of all risks.

   We have responded to the results of our climate and ESG stress tests in an active and integrated way. This has involved substantially increasing the share of public equity capital managed, to optimise the use of scarce natural resources and mitigate waste

The cost of a comfortable retirement: our value for money approach

We’ve always focused on the value gained from the costs we incur, rather than costs in isolation. Super funds with lower fees don’t necessarily offer the best, nor the most sustainable value, as savings transition across changing market environments.

We believe that what matters is the wealth that is able to be preserved, as well as grown, to ensure reliable income in retirement. We expend costs not just to transact assets, but importantly, to reinvest in them, sustain their cashflow generation and enable them to continue to compete effectively as the world around them evolves. We also incur costs in building diversified return sources that build resilience within our customer’s portfolios.

In short, we are incurring costs to increase the probability of our average member achieving a comfortable retirement through portfolio diversification, high-quality private assets and agile asset allocation. We are conscious that value is not price, and that we invest alongside market participants with different agendas, time horizons and appetites for loss.

Some examples of our assets that are not able to accessed cheaply include:

• High quality private infrastructure like windfarms and satellites.
• Private companies where the owners control the business and have expertise in the industries and ecosystem in which it operates.
• Property assets, where the costs of operating and proactively managing the assets to maintain their experiential, green and technology-efficient offerings are more visible and explicit than those involved in generic exposures to very small shares in such assets through listed markets.

Our goal is your comfortable retirement. Everything we do, from how we invest to who we invest in, is done with your future in mind. To see more about our world-class investment strategy.