BT and Westpac raise the bar on super

Westpac and its funds management arm BT have produced a revamped superannuation offering that the bank has managed to link more closely to the everyday banking platform used by customers. Westpac and BT have also cut fees to a level well below those common for retail superannuation in Australia.

Dubbed BT Super for Life, Westpac will charge customers of this retail super product a flat fee of $5 per month plus 0.99 per cent of balance annually, making it more competitive with the fees charged by industry super funds.

A key innovation is to feature a customer's superannuation balance alongside their transaction, deposit and loan balances on Westpac's internet banking platform.

"This has been a massive job," said Rob Coombes, chief executive of BT Financial. "We've been working on this for at least 18 months. At one stage we had 200 technicians on it.

"We had to work through interfacing into 70 different banking systems responsibly and without compromising security.

"Logistically it has been very, very difficult to create something that is so simple for the customer to use."

He said the balance displayed will be the value as at the close of the markets the day before.

Coombes is happy to be out on front of the market with this product and says he expects other banks to follow suit.

"Something like this is a significant amount of work, so I suspect the other banks are working away on creating something, but yes it's a big undertaking."

The only other product now in the marketplace offering bank access to super is ANZ/ING's OneAnswer pension account which was launched in May. That is available only for over-60s.

"This is significantly different to the ANZ product," said Coombe "This is a real super account, not a cash management account and is available to all age groups."

One gimmick is that credit card customers can opt to convert reward points from their credit card spending into a superannuation contribution.