Our super system has a new blind spot, and it could cost you thousands

If you have a financial adviser and your superannuation investments are being managed on something called a platform, there are some important things to look at this week.

Australia’s financial regulator, ASIC has just released a report that found some serious gaps in the way our major platforms are safeguarding members’ money. The findings are concerning enough that ASIC brought them to me to explain to you simply, so you’re more aware of them.

Basically, investment platforms are meant to have processes, monitoring and caps in place to stop shonky advisers or dodgy investment businesses from taking advantage of unknowing consumers. ASIC has repeatedly asked the platforms to take their responsibilities as trustees seriously, driving for three big obligations.

Firstly, to keep Australian superannuation money invested in their platform safe, especially from bad conduct. This means platforms need to carefully vet the investments they offer and ensure no bad actors can use them as a vehicle to take advantage of members.

Secondly, to make sure that Australians are getting genuine value for money for the services being paid for out of their super and that members actually understand what those services are. And finally, to deliver investment, member and retirement services that sit at the heart of what a superannuation trustee is to provide.

Those three obligations sound pretty reasonable when you say them out loud. They’re not complicated or tricky. But when ASIC reviewed six of Australia’s largest platform trustees recently, organisations that are responsible for safeguarding $400 billion of retirement savings, across all three of those expectations there were serious and persistent failings.

Most advisers I speak to would prefer to move their clients onto a platform than keep them in a low-cost industry super fund.

Before we go further I want to stop and make sure you know what a platform really is because most people, even many people who are in one, often don’t fully realise it or understand it. Most people don’t walk into a financial adviser’s office and ask them for a platform. The adviser recommends one.

In fact, most advisers have built their businesses around using platforms to manage their clients’ assets. A platform lets your adviser look after all your investments in one place – your super, your shares, managed funds and ETFs, with detailed reporting and tax tracking built in.

Platforms like Hub24, North, Netwealth, Macquarie Wrap, BT Panorama, and CFS Edge are big names you might recognise.

They are the single fastest-growing space in superannuation right now, and most advisers I speak to would prefer to move their clients onto a platform and define and manage their investments themselves than keep them in a low-cost industry super fund.

It makes sense – advisers earn an annual fee, usually based on how much money they hold in managed investments in the platform. It’s a healthy business model for an industry that has been through the wringer in the past 10 years as product commissions were ruled out.

And the numbers back this up. When I spoke with Commissioner Simone Constant on the Prime Time podcast this week, she was direct about the scale of growth in platforms, and had concerns about advice fees growing even faster.

In the 10 years to June 2025, superannuation platforms have experienced extraordinary growth, with a more than three-fold increase in member benefits, from $123 billion to $396 billion, compared to the wider superannuation sector which more than doubled. Over the same period, advice fees charged from superannuation platforms have increased four-fold to $2.23 billion, the Commissioner told me.

Now, I don’t want to be unfair. For many Australians, particularly those with complex financial needs, a large balance or a real desire to have their investments actively managed, a platform with a great adviser can absolutely be the right choice.

The truth of the matter is, that they work well when the advice is genuinely tailored to you, the fees are reasonable relative to what you’re getting in services, and your platform trustee is properly supervising what is happening inside your account.

But ASIC says that’s not the case and the gaps they’ve found are serious enough that some unscrupulous advisers have been able to take advantage of people without anyone catching them.

It’s pointed out three things platforms are not doing well – and wants consumers to be wary of these issues, and more aware of their super if it’s advised and held in a platform.

The first problem ASIC have flagged is that these platforms have not implemented appropriate caps on the fees advisers can charge through them. Trustees are supposed to limit how much can be charged to a members’ superannuation account in advice fees.

But many are setting their caps well above what ASIC deems sensible. Two years ago ASIC published a formal report after finding fee caps as high as $20,000, which they said then was too high. Now, in 2026, some of these platforms have actually increased the caps.

One trustee admits having a cap of $25,000, and another plans to introduce a cap of $30,000. After repeated warnings from ASIC, things appear to be getting worse, not better.

And the real concern is when advisers use these fee caps to draw extortionate fees when compared to the size of the balance under management. The Commissioner said ASIC found one adviser who was specifically targeting members with a balance of around $10,000 and on average half those members’ balances were being consumed by fees. Half!

The second problem ASIC has flagged is that the most basic checks of advice documents are not being done by trustees. And you need to understand why this is important.

Every time an adviser charges a fee to your trustee-run super account there is supposed to be a document that proves that advice was actually given to you and that the adviser giving it is properly licensed and that there are no obvious red flags over what the fee is for.

The platform trustee is supposed to sample those documents regularly and check them – and not to check if the advice was good, just to check that the very basics are in order.

But ASIC found that these checks were being fundamentally neglected across most of the six trustees they reviewed. In fact, one trustee ran 21 of these checks over an entire 15-month review period.

And even worse – when they did those 21 checks, 75 per cent came back with problems. Three of the trustees had at least one month when there were zero checks done on advice documents too. Yet they kept deducting fees from members’ accounts.

Finally, the monitoring of the warning signs of bad behaviour is inadequate. The supervision of things like an unusual and significant spike in new members joining the platform via a single adviser, strange patterns in investment flows, or fee structures that seem to be designed to specifically avoid alerts, were apparently not being tracked.

These are the same warning signs that, if they had been acted on earlier, might have protected some of the 11,000 Australians who lost more than $1.1 billion in the Shield and First Guardian collapses.

When I asked Commissioner Constant directly whether the failures that ASIC had found over these six unnamed trustees are the same kind of failures that made those disasters possible, she was clear.

The controls and red flags a trustee should have in place would be an important line of protection. The fact that many of these trustees still haven’t put them in place has pushed ASIC to the end of its patience.

Now before I tell you what to do, there’s one more thing worth knowing, which is that the obligations flagged by ASIC to monitor advisers closely and protect members don’t only apply to platforms, they apply to any super fund – industry, retail or platform – that deducts advice fees from member accounts. They carry the same responsibilities around adviser oversight. This fact often gets lost in discussions about platforms.

And this matters right now because industry funds in particular are losing members at a significant rate as advisers move their clients onto platforms that better suit their own business model. An adviser running a platform-based practice earns ongoing fees based on the money they manage.

It’s a sound business model for them, and for many clients it can deliver genuinely good outcomes, but it also means that advisers have a strong commercial incentive to recommend a move to platform. And that incentive exists whether the switch is right for you personally.

This is precisely why I want more openness and transparency around these advice business models, and why I think it matters so much that everyday Australians understand all their options before they decide about where their super sits.

So here are some questions you can use when an adviser recommends a platform: What specifically makes this the right choice for my situation and my retirement goals? What fees will I be charged today and on an ongoing basis? And can you show me a direct comparison between this platform and the best performing, low-cost super funds available to me right now so I can see exactly what I’m gaining and what it will cost me to get there?

Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.

• Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.

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