BT grilled on super upgrade delays

Committee chair and Labor MP Andrew Leigh questioned BT managing director of super Melinda Howes around the length of the upgrade, which was flagged by the wealth giant in late 2019 and involved the transfer of over 200,000 super customers to a new IT system.

The migration began in February and took around five weeks to complete, meaning customers were unable to have transactions within their super portfolios processed when COVID-related market volatility hit in March, Ms Howes explained.

“We are undertaking a large business simplification program and just before COVID hit we undertook a migration of more than 200,000 customers,” she said.

“We let them know there would be a period in which we wouldn't be processing their transactions so all the transactions processed when that period lifted, and it was unfortunate that that occurred during a period of market volatility that we couldn’t have foreseen.”

Ms Howes said the timeline for the migration, which was part of a larger BT upgrade of $21 billion in customer super balances to the new digital system, was normal given the complexity of the transactions involved.

“That was for the unit prices where large amounts of assets were being transferred, it is quite normal and this was one of our most complex tranches of migration,” she said.

“We understand there was some disruption for many customers and that was unfortunate. It would have been handled better had there not been a major market dislocation in the process.”

Ms Howes said the market volatility caused by COVID had added more complexity to the February tranche of customer upgrades, which had taken a longer time than subsequent migrations completed as part of the project.

“It depends on the size of migration – we did another tranche in August, which was a simpler tranche and the freeze period was shorter, so it depends on the size and scale,” she said.

“It was longer than expected because of market instability, which we weren’t expecting when we planned that. It’s unfortunate there was a disruption but the context is 97 per cent of members are better off, they have a digital product with access to their super whenever they want on the Panorama mobile app. The end result is a better outcome for them.”