Welcome to The Retirement Rubicon

Welcome to the very first edition of “The Retirement Rubicon”. If this landed in your inbox direct from Lumisara, congrats, you’re among the first to cross with us.

Why the reference to ‘crossing the Rubicon’? That’s what I titled a recent piece I penned on Australia’s super system, 33-odd years old (in its modern form), $4.3-odd trillion in aggregate, but with the retirement phase (at sub-$600 billion) only now starting to step out from the ARPA-regulated fund shadows and into the center of policy, regulation, product design and member experience. That’s the crossing we’re focused on.

My own focus on decumulation predates 2022’s Retirement Income Covenant - back before David Murray’s 2014/15 Financial System Inquiry (CIPR anyone? 🤔) and the 2009/10 Cooper Review, to the late 1990s and comprehensive (ok, High Net Worth & SMSF) financial advice. That experience later fed into institutional consulting and building retirement income solutions for super funds.

On matters retail v insto, please note that this newsletter isn’t for retail investors. It’s for wealth and superannuation professionals - trustees, product managers, technologists, advice leaders and member-experience teams.

According to the latest ABS stats, 156,000 people retired during 2024-25, and some 2.5 million will likely retire this decade. They’re looking to us, collectively, for clearer guidance and better retirement solutions. There’s no time to waste, so let’s get to it. ⌛

What to expect from The Retirement Rubicon?

The Retirement Rubicon will be brief, practical and published fortnightly. We’ll curate and interpret what matters to you across three key decumulation themes:

Our aim: signal over noise, and actionable takeaways over long sermons.

On with the first edition. Enjoy!

Our recently released white paper takes a look at the growing debt burden of Australian households, which is increasingly impacting retirement outcomes. I wrote a piece in Firstlinks to summarise our findings, and to help extend the retirement readiness conversation towards a ‘household balance sheet’ view.

New kid on the super block, Vanguard Super, recently released its third annual ‘How Australia Retires’ report, based on a survey of some 1,800 individuals. It seeks to understand how Australians are preparing for, and experiencing, retirement. The report has some interesting observations across financial literacy, retirement income expectations and the role of housing, and is definitely worth a look.

Aware Super has announced Retirement Manager, a digital advice tool that helps members determine how much can be drawn in retirement and how long it will last, with scenario modelling, an income confidence score, Age Pension estimates, spouse inclusion, and a guided path to human advice. It’s in pilot now, with broader rollout flagged following testing. I recently saw a demo of this tool in action at the 13th Post Retirement Conference (where I was on a panel on Housing, the Age Pension and Retirement Income).

Rest Super has introduced Retire Ready: a digital questionnaire that curates the fund’s resources - articles, videos, calculators, webinar and routes members to advice tools and specialist support via one interface. It’s positioned as a lightweight, personalised entry point into Rest’s existing advice ecosystem.

Lumisara’s Quick Take

Two top-10 funds (Aware and Rest) now have new retirement experiences live, and Bravura’s Midwinter advice tech is in the mix: Aware’s tool was designed with Bravura, Rest has long run digital advice on Midwinter AdviceOS, and, as Bravura highlights, AMP, Aware and Rest have all “ramped up Midwinter-based initiatives” in 2025.

The fact that these two major funds also have not waited for the final shape of ‘Tranche 2b’ of the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes legislative package to execute on these digital initiatives is also noteworthy.

At this early stage, we are watching for potential convergence in UX patterns and assumptions. The market isn’t one-vendor only (see UniSuper × Ignition Advice) and emerging offers from other providers are likely to shape how quickly features and differentiation evolve.

In August, APRA’s Deputy Chair Margaret Cole spoke at the Conexus Retirement Conference, calling the 2022 introduction of the Retirement Income Covenant a ‘watershed moment’. Cole urged trustees to shift from accumulation to improving retirement outcomes, as assets in the retirement phase climb towards ~$3 trillion over the next two decades. Cole concluded the speech with a direct call for the industry to “be extremely well positioned to support retirement outcomes at scale and to manage the risks arising from a vastly increased retirement asset pool”.

In October, Deputy Chair Cole further reiterated this theme during her remarks at the FSC Innovation in Retirement conference. She discussed APRA’s priorities for superannuation with the key theme being the APRA-regulated sector’s transition to the retirement phase. She warned trustees that the RIC work still lacks urgency, with APRA’s pulse checks indicating a lack of progress in tracking and measuring the success of retirement income strategies.

The co-regulators’ direction is now unambiguous: APRA and ASIC’s 2023 and 2024 RIC reviews warned trustees about a lack of urgency and under-developed measurement of retirement outcomes, a message Deputy Chair Cole reiterated in August and again in October this year. APRA-regulated funds are bracing for a less-than-glowing 2025 report, due any day now.

ASIC has framed this as the great retirement race, and APRA’s forward agenda keeps retirement outcomes squarely in focus.