Exploring the Superannuation Early Release Scheme dataset from APRA

Published in

Prosperity Advisers DnA

4 min readMay 18, 2020

I’ve been a little busy these last few weeks so I only just found out that APRA (Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority) has been publishing statistics detailing payments made to members who have requested early access to their superannuation funds. This is significant when you consider that Australia has the world’s 4th largest pool of pension fund money.

As per usual, I can’t help but tinker and try to make these datasets more insightful and easier to explore.

You can get access to the app here: LINK

App features

There are a few sections covered in the app but before we get into that, the set up for this app is the main menu on the left-hand side of the page. There is a sub-menu with yellow underlining whether your’e looking at weekly or cumulative data. Filters are available in the top bar of the page and you need to make sure you pick a period (there are 2 to choose from 3rd May or 10th May). Other than that, the charts on the page and the statistics on the right correspond to what page you’ve navigated to.

Insights

This next section showcases some of the insights we can see from using the app that may not have been apparent just merely looking at the data in Excel.

There’s an increase in funds taking more than 10 days to pay members

Navigating to the Processing Times page, most funds are doing this within 5 business days. Some funds took longer and focusing on them we can see some with claims between 6 to 9 days and hardly any taking 10 days or more for the week of 3rd May (note: I’ve scrolled to the bottom of the 2nd bar chart to show funds taking longer to pay).

Changing the date to the week of 10th May and the picture changes. Now we’re seeing more orange (funds with payments taking 10 days or longer). Whereas above we saw the average fund making payments in less than 5 days 89% of the time, this has dropped to 84% as at 10th May.

2. Industy super funds have made the most payments, doubling the next nearest fund type (Retail)

Retail funds played catch up though because as of 3rd May, cumulative payments for Industry funds were $4.1 billion compared to $1.7 billion for Retail. As at 10th May that was $5.3 billion and $2.5 billion respectively.

Across Industry funds the top payers are shown by clicking on the Industry fund type bar chart (left). We can see AustralianSuper takes out top billing at $1.14 billion to date.

For Retail funds, Retirement Wrap from BT was the top payer of early release super at $0.42 billion to date.

3. Not all funds are seeing the full $10k payments being taken by members

As at 10th May, the average payout is $8.2k and Industry and Retail funds are only averaging $8.0k and $8.5k respectively.

If we look at the bottom of the bar chart, we can see that there are many firms with members withdrawing less than the $10k entitlement.

4. Very few claims are being closed or revoked

Looking at claims made to date, the outcomes can be seen in the Status menu. In terms of cumulative payments to date, the most common outcome is Paid with very few moving to Closed or Revoked.