According to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), TelstraSuper unsuccessfully complied with its internal dispute resolution processes by delaying customer responses by over 100 days due to untrained staff, which led the regulator to sue the retirement fund in a historic first.
The response time was glacially slow with the ASIC finding one customer waited 276 days without a response, while others waited for TelstraSuper to respond from 105 to 101 days.
Previously, the fund was available only to Telstra staff, but recently, the fund opened its membership last year and now manages more than $25 billion in retirement savings for nearly 100,000 members.
“In some cases, complainants suffered financial loss while the complaint remained unresolved or experienced delays in obtaining compensation or access to moneys to which they were found to be entitled.” ASIC said in the court documents.
TelstraSuper said they are taking the ASIC case “very seriously” and it working to optimise its customer service.
Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones said the government would consider further regulation and that they have already “spent the last year putting them on notice, but won’t spend the next year doing exactly the same thing”.
