Tasplan is a profit-for-members super fund, managing over $10.5 billion in assets for over 130,000 members Australia-wide. Beyond supporting members to accumulate their retirement savings during working life, Tasplan also offer a choice of pension products to meet the different needs of members reaching retirement. Tasplan also provides value to members by providing a range of investment options, affordable insurance, access to low-interest loans, discounted health insurance and estate planning. Tasplan’s approach to integrated systems and data enable’s the fund to have a single view of members. This capability is seen as a key strength and competitive differentiator. By leveraging this platform Tasplan can deliver high-quality customised services that are well received by the membership – and this is how the fund approach the superannuation market. By having a clear understanding of members and a good end-to-end control over member-facing processes, Tasplan is able to foster high levels of member satisfaction, member engagement and strong account retention.

Tasplan acquire the majority of its new members through default superannuation fund status with both state and local government enterprise agreements and larger key employers based in the state. Within the industry, this ensures a ready supply of new members that supports Tasplan’s organic growth and sustainability. Tasplan is able to exercise direct control over the end-to-end member experience by comparison to many other funds within the industry, because of its integrated systems approach. With direct management of everything from the member contact centre, websites, member portals, member communication and transaction processing the fund can leverage its competitive advantage through the delivery of high quality and customised services to members.

One of the key challenges faced by the industry is effective communication with members. Barriers impacting effective communication include low levels of general financial literacy among the public, resulting in disengagement, product ignorance and general lack of understanding. Therefore a day-to-day challenge for the sector is producing communications that break through general disengagement, impart a clear message that’s able to be understood by recipients while remaining compliant against regulatory and advice disclosure requirements. Overcoming these challenges improves member engagement and satisfaction with Tasplan while improving superannuation knowledge and literacy. Increased knowledge leads to improved member outcomes by empowering members to make more effective and educated choices during their lifelong superannuation journey. Given Tasplan’s integrated systems and single view of member, the fund is well placed to develop communication initiatives that do overcome these challenges.

Tasplan’s campaign presented a tailored set of next-best-action prompts. These prompts were directly related to the members life-stage and the actions that more engaged members typically take at that age. The idea was to encourage campaign engagement into actual account engagement – to employer members whose engagement was awoken due to the education provided. To deliver the campaign Tasplan needed to build additional technological capability to securely deliver highly personalised content with low barriers to members accessing this information. This campaign delivered on member engagement and extended Tasplan’s technology – contributing to its integrated systems model and ultimately competitive advantage.

Tasplan’s Engagement team identified some key opportunities to improve member engagement by reviewing the funds business intelligence and performing a review of previous research into member behaviour. Tasplan’s campaign idea is to educate members by showing them what they have, where they have come from and where they are going. They wanted the initiative to be personal and easily accessible. Importantly however, Tasplan needed to ensure that the campaign protected member privacy and presented an acceptable level of data security. Again, a key enabler of delivering this campaign was going to be the delivery of a technology solution. From these insights and original idea, the Engagement team developed a campaign concept complete with a simple prototype to assist in demonstrating the campaign idea. The team wanted to take away all the usual complexity to ensure the target audience could easily absorb and understand the presented information.

The campaign also reflected an idea to progressively reveal information to members, not overload them. Revealing more information as the user scrolled would help the team to tell the users a story about their account – rather than just hit them with an account dashboard or similar presentation. Key to successfully telling this story was looking at past context, current context and future context to provide a structure to the presented information. This concluded with a look forward into retirement. The team felt that interactivity would be a key part of encouraging account engagement. From scrolling to reveal their account story through to subtle animation on hover, they believed a lot of interactivity would be built into the interface. Providing the retirement outlook as a calculator was designed to encourage users to engage with the campaign site while educating them about the impact small actions now will have in the long term.

Tasplan was able to leverage its resources (including some external consultant expertise) across the project with a high degree of mutual dependency. Development pathways were smoothed by having clear documentation, resource and timing estimates. Regular communication and project connection meetings were held across the teams where the focus was on addressing hand-over and dependencies between the parallel build of different elements. This proved an effective strategy when elements were combined into a test environment for user acceptance testing and sign off.

The campaign has already begun to deliver on campaign objectives and been extremely well received by Tasplan members. Importantly, the development of the required technology to enable the campaign provides new capability enabling the fund to further pursue its strategy. The secure delivery of personalised content, with a lower barrier to entry than account log in, adds immense value to Tasplan’s integrated systems business model. There are a range of opportunities for the reuse of this technology in further member engagement and education campaigns. This positions the fund to be able to continue to overcome the challenges of engagement inherent in the sector with future education, communication and engagement initiatives.