21-05-2025
HESTA super members furious at outage
Andy Park: A planned outage at one of Australia's largest super funds has seen its members' accounts frozen for seven weeks. Hester, who has more than one million members, is changing their administration provider in an outage which will last until the first week of June. One client says he almost lost his home deposit after he was banking on his super to cover the costs, as Adelaide Miller reports.
Adelaide Miller: Annette Mumford has been a member of superannuation fund Hester for decades. But that might not last much longer after the fund's planned seven-week outage.
Annette Mumford: I find it very distressing and I'm just gobsmacked that they have not even notified their customers.
Adelaide Miller: Miss Mumford says she didn't receive any information about the fund going offline.
Annette Mumford: I was so distressed thinking, oh my gosh, because there's no time for planning because it had already closed down without me knowing in advance to make any planning if I needed to. And I called them and put in a formal complaint about two or three weeks ago and just got a lame reply back saying, oh we're really sorry that you didn't get the email.
Adelaide Miller: HESTA, one of Australia's largest superfunds, is in the middle of a planned seven-week outage, affecting more than one million Australians as they transition to a new administration provider. Currently, only urgent payments may be processed, with lump sum payments of up to 80% of balances. While Hester alerted its members back in February through emails, its website and in some cases letters in the mail, dozens of customers contacted the ABC in distress, saying they had been caught out.
Xavier O'halloran: Some super funds just don't have up-to-date contact details. We've spoken to Hester about this as well. They've probably got more email addresses than a lot of super funds have, but clearly there's still been issues.
Adelaide Miller: CEO of Super Consumers Australia, Xavier O'Halloran, says super funds need to be doing a better job when communicating with customers, particularly when it means customers can't access much-needed funds.
Xavier O'halloran: Encouraging super funds to go above and beyond in situations like this, if they are getting bounce backs, what other contact details do they have other than snail mail? Really, they should be making the effort to call people and let them know that they're going to be subject to this period of time where they won't be able to access their money and what they can do to mitigate against any harm that might cause.
Adelaide Miller: He also says the length of time offline is the longest he's seen with any super fund.
Xavier O'halloran: They've made some concessions to allow people to access, but we continue to hear from people who can't get through, can't get money when they need it, and as a result they're going into financial hardship.
Adelaide Miller: Daniela Paidi's client is one of those people. The property lawyer remembers how distressed her client became when he realised he couldn't access his money.
Daniella Paidi: We reached out to HESTA, we couldn't get on to anybody, we didn't receive a timely response or any kind of clear communication. There was the opportunity to leave an online inquiry and to make a complaint. We used both avenues really just to try and get somebody to speak to.
Adelaide Miller: She says he was relying on his super to pay his deposit for a property purchase, but because he's been locked out he almost lost the $28,000 deposit.
Daniella Paidi: I was able to negotiate an extension of the settlement date, but since then we've been issued with a default and rescission notice. Because of this upgrade he's been caught out and is now having to deal with the emotional and financial burden.
Adelaide Miller: Ms Paidi says someone in her network was able to put her in contact with Hester and 80% of funds were deposited last week. The remainder early this week and the property was settled. A spokesperson for Hester said in a statement the fund is sorry for any inconvenience. It's continuing to support members through this period of change and the transition will provide the technology platform and data capabilities to better service members in the years ahead. But Ms Paidi says there's a lot to be learnt from this process.
Daniella Paidi: The focus for Hester going forward really looking at this situation and thinking okay well we are entrusted with acting in the best interests of these clients or our people and I think you know the question should be have we acted in the best interests of our clients here and how can we do things better in the future.
Andy Park: Property lawyer Daniella Paidi ending Adelaide Miller's report there.
