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Building a resilient, platform-led foundation for the future with CareSuper
How transitioning from bespoke divergent integrations to a guardrailed, self-service platform enabled CareSuper to accelerate delivery timelines and improve frictionless member experiences
Delivering exceptional member experiences in the highly regulated superannuation sector requires an underlying technology foundation that enables agility, security and compliance by default.
As part of its award-winning Stratos Program, designed to simplify its technology landscape and establish secure, AI-ready foundations, CareSuper set out to transform its integration delivery. Following a successful merger of two funds, the goal was to reduce legacy complexity, improve the speed to production in development teams and establish a scalable platform for long-term operational resilience.
Partnering with Equal Experts, CareSuper successfully transitioned from a traditional, project-centric integration model to forward-thinking, platform-led development. By establishing automated guardrails and shared engineering standards, the fund has created a scalable framework that elevates digital member experiences and drives operational efficiencies.
Outcomes
From 3 months to 2 weeks
Dramatically reduced time to production for new integrations
Frictionless member logins
Reduced multi-factor authentication (MFA) SMS delivery latency from 30 seconds down to 1 second
Award-winning project
Part of CareSuper’s Stratos Program, which won the TasICT Excellence Award 2026 for Best Delivery of a Technology Project
About CareSuper
CareSuper is an award-winning, profit-to-member industry super fund. Its vision is to be Australia’s most trusted partner in retirement confidence through exceptional care and connection. CareSuper provides super, retirement, and advice options when needed to help members feel confident on their journey to, and through, retirement.
Industry
Superannuation
Organisation size
More than 615,000 members, over $60B funds under management
Location
Australia
Length of project
7 months
Challenge
Overcoming integration complexity and governance bottlenecks
As a growing fund, CareSuper’s leadership recognised the need to ensure underlying technology foundations and engineering capabilities could scale efficiently and securely.
Previously, building bespoke implementations for new integrations required manual setup of security protocols, authentication mechanisms, and infrastructure. Rigorous manual checks were required for each bespoke implementation, including comprehensive architectural reviews, design sign-offs, and penetration testing. This was resource-intensive and extended delivery timelines to three months or more, impacting CareSuper’s speed in continuing to improve vital services for members.
CareSuper wanted to shift from a project-centric delivery model to a consistent, scalable, platform-led engineering approach that would enable future growth. After numerous successful engagements over the years with CareSuper, Equal Experts was engaged to help create an integration platform to improve this process and embed modern engineering capabilities.
Solution
Aligning the platform vision and establishing a reference architecture
The initiative began with a collaborative discovery workshop bringing together key technology and business stakeholders. The joint team mapped the full delivery lifecycle from ideation to production deployment and identified core user personas for the platform.
Working alongside CareSuper’s architecture leaders, the team established standardised reference patterns backed by governance guardrails. Integrations aligned to these pre-approved patterns benefit from streamlined review paths, significantly shortening approval cycles that could previously take up to a month while maintaining rigorous compliance standards.
A bespoke Software Development Kit (SDK) and developer portal
To reduce developer cognitive load and support CareSuper’s developers to build pattern-aligned integrations, the team built a custom SDK and developer portal which provides automated scaffolding for all new integrations by default. Developers no longer need to act as their own infrastructure or security departments. They can now create uniform, secure and reliable integrations by default, which can be easily updated and maintained at scale.
Validating the platform with legacy applications and three new integrations
To validate the platform under real-world conditions, 11 legacy applications were migrated to the new platform, immediately gaining an uplift with auto-scaling capabilities, telemetry observation, and multi-region resilience. Additionally, three critical production services were engineered using the new SDK to deliver immediate business value:
- Accelerated Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Member Online: Optimised multi-factor authentication delivery mechanisms, reducing verification latency from 30 seconds to 1 second with built-in fallbacks to prevent accidental account lockouts.
- Maintaining member communications: Modernised event-driven connections between core administration data and engagement platforms to maintain seamless continuity in member communications.
- Automated email bounce handling: Implemented automated processes to keep member contact information up-to-date, ensuring critical fund updates reach members promptly.
Results
Dramatic development velocity increase and operational resilience
The end-to-end process to take an integration from business requirement to a production service has been slashed from over three months to as short as two weeks for some projects, driving rapid value for the fund and its members.
With architecture review board pre-approval, scaffolding in minutes, accelerated development through the SDK and streamlined guardrails, developers can build and deploy integrations faster and more consistently. The updated platform architecture delivers high availability, automated scaling, and robust failover boundaries, ensuring continuous digital service availability.
Improving services for members without disruption
By improving MFA SMS delivery to 1 second and providing an automated email option for incorrect phone numbers, friction during the online account login process has been reduced, with fewer members locked out of their account each day.
The automated bounce handling engine also ensures high member data cleanliness, ensuring more members are regularly receiving email communications from CareSuper. This is helping reduce thousands of dollars in physical print and postage costs for mandatory annual statements to members if a correct email address is not available.
All 11 legacy integrations were also successfully migrated onto the new platform with zero downtime and no disruption to members.
Foundation for broader digital transformation
While initially scoped for integrations, the platform was built with potential for expansion into a full digital platform. It provides a robust foundation across CareSuper’s digital ecosystem, including primary member portals and emerging AI-enabled capabilities.
It also formed part of CareSuper’s award-winning Stratos Program, a major enterprise transformation to simplify its technology landscape, strengthen core platforms and establish a secure, AI-ready foundation for the future. The program was awarded Best Delivery of a Technology Project at the 2026 TasICT Excellence Awards and was a National iAwards Finalist for Excellence in Innovation.
This initiative was about creating stronger foundations that help us deliver better outcomes for members, both today and into the future. By working in partnership with Equal Experts, we were able to modernise key capabilities while strengthening the skills, knowledge and ways of working within our own teams.
Conclusion
CareSuper’s investment in a modern, guardrailed integration platform demonstrates how a forward-thinking superannuation fund can turn technology into a distinct competitive advantage. By empowering developers, automating governance, and building on a resilient foundation, CareSuper has achieved significant improvements in operational efficiency and velocity.
The platform is already delivering on CareSuper’s overarching goal of delivering better experiences and outcomes for its members through frictionless login processes, helping to engage members and providing important information to them quickly.
The superannuation fund has successfully built a future-proof foundation, ready to absorb market growth, adapt to evolving regulatory landscapes, and consistently deliver industry-leading experiences for its members.
Successfully delivering this work with no material disruption to members reflects the strong collaboration, planning and discipline across both CareSuper and Equal Experts. Just as importantly, the partnership has helped establish scalable capabilities and practices that will support future innovation and service improvements across the fund.