$50bn industry fund Cbus tech rebuild brings digital assets back in house

The days of Industry Super fund members accepting a Spartan digital experience in exchange for better financial returns than flashier but more expensive for-profit competitors are officially numbered.

Construction heavyweight Cbus has revealed an ambitious tech rebuild to renovate digital experiences and interfaces for its more than 800,000 members, a move that signals a broader push across the sector get user experience to perform as well as funds under management.

Cbus, whose sizeable membership base feels the waves of market volatility more acutely than sectors like health or education,  recently revealed the second phase of a digital transformation started in August of 2018 , with new work focused on the use of data to streamline “member experiences”.

With around $50 billion under management, the fund saw an opportunity to uplift its technology foundations in support of its goal “to provide the best possible retirement for our members,” Cbus product owner Lucy Stow told Salesforce’s financial services basecamp in Melbourne late last month.

Stow said that Cbus initially engaged Deloitte Digital to draw up a “service blueprint” for how it could transform to achieve the right outcomes for members.

“It became very clear to us through that process that there were a number of assets, be they assisted channels or unassisted channels like our digital assets, that needed to come into Cbus, and we needed to be empowered to run them effectively to deliver those outcomes,” Stow said.

“It was a very long discussion where we actually understood the need to bring all of our channels into a single place, and then surface that through an omnichannel experience.”

The new experience is powered by a new stack that includes software from Adobe, Salesforce and Tableau.

“We started our detailed design work in August of last year,” Stow said.

“We then released Salesforce capability in May to our first tranche of employees. Then, in June, we launched our digital assets, our member 'join online' process, and Salesforce capability for our contact centre agent team to support those members joining in June.”

Stow said that the second phase of the transformation is now being “rapidly built out”.

“Phase two is really about enabling better data sets within our environment,” she said.

“As we build out our capability, we really want to make member experiences easier and smoother.”

For example, Stow said that a member that needed to register financial hardship had to “come in to our front counter team, and be expected to fill out a series of forms”. 

“Now, that is a terribly painful personal experience for that member,” she said.

“What we hope in phase two is that suddenly that is not only supported, but we can enact that outcome for that member faster than what we can today.”

Where that kind of service delivery could take “somewhere between seven to 10 working days” at the moment, Stow said Cbus “really want to bring that down so that the member gets the right outcome for them as quickly as possible.”