Industry funds have topped the growth charts in the year to March with their assets under management up 16 per cent, according to the latest figures produced by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.

The assets managed by industry funds rose to total $517.9 billion and now make up 22.9 per cent of all super assets. Their main competitors, retail funds, grew 9.06 per cent while the second best performance was from self-managed super funds, up 12.8 per cent to $674.7 billion.

SMSF’s are the largest single super fund type but their growth has slowed in recent years.

The uncertainty created last year by the long political fight over Turnbull government changes to superannuation rules seem to have cut back super contributions. Personal contributions, which are discretionary, fell back by 2.8 per cent last year and they are 10 per cent below where they were for the September 2015 year.

Meanwhile, super guarantee payments, which employers make for workers, and salary sacrifice payments, which, while voluntary, are triggered by formal arrangements with employers, are both up by more than 5 per cent.

The performance of super funds was on average a positive rate of return of 10.5 per cent for the year to March and over five years was 8.6 per cent.

But the ageing of the population  is making itself felt with withdrawals from the super system totalling $70.443 billion, up from $63.187 billion the previous year rise of 11.14 per cent. The consolidation of super funds is continuing with APRA regulated fund numbers dropping from 252 to 240.

APRA has said it wants to see fund numbers drop further as many smaller and underperforming funds do not serve members’ interests. The number of retail funds dropped by nine to 131 over the year while public sector fund numbers dropped by one as did industry fund and corporate fund numbers.

SMSF numbers were up 3.8 per cent to 590,742.

The data also showed that MySuper’s impact on the default regime, with assets in MySuper products totalling $555 billion at the end of the March 2017 quarter, a 22.6 per cent increase for the year.

The move is the result of the impending deadline of June 30 for all default funds where members have not made an active choice to be switched into My Super compliant funds.

Total assets in the APRA regulated super system increased by 2.4 per cent (or $36.5 billion) to $1.58 trillion. Add in SMSFs and the total is $2.25 trillion.

Some 50.2 per cent of the APRA regulated funds were invested in equities of which 23.6 per cent were Australian listed, 22.6 per cent international and 4.1 per cent in unlisted equities.

The APRA regulated funds had fixed income and cash investments accounting for 32.6 per cent of investments; 20.6 per cent in fixed income and 12.1 per cent in cash, while property and infrastructure accounted for 13.3 per cent of investments, and 3.8 per cent were invested in other assets, including hedge funds and commodities.

The New Daily is owned by a group of industry super funds