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Designing a modern, empathetic death claims experience for a major superannuation fund in four weeks
Superannuation
How a leading Australian super fund mapped a path to faster claims resolution and regulatory compliance
In the weeks following the death of a loved one, surviving family members are often faced with an overwhelming amount of financial and personal admin to complete while grieving. Securing a superannuation death benefit can often mean confronting a complex maze of forms, legal requirements and identity verification, adding unnecessary stress to a period of mourning and delaying payment of vital funds to families.
After the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) released a sector-wide report revealing the devastating impacts that poor industry practices can have on grieving Australians, one of the country’s leading funds chose to act proactively.
In a focused four-week engagement, Equal Experts worked alongside the fund to audit its end-to-end claims lifecycle, identify bottlenecks across fragmented legacy systems and deliver a digital prototype for a new, faster process for families.
By creating a sensitive online user experience, streamlining data capture and expanding use of digital verification tools, the fund established a roadmap to reduce claim resolution times from three months to four weeks. The project also ensured the fund could demonstrate to ASIC how it had acted quickly on the report to maintain full regulatory compliance while also outlining a faster, sensitive and trusted process for its members at a time when it matters most.
Outcomes
Four weeks
Mapped the existing user journey, identified pain points and prototyped a new solution
Faster claims processing
Designed an operational path to reduce claim resolution times from 3 months to approx. 4 weeks
Compliance roadmap
Audit-ready strategy to demonstrate proactive regulatory action
About the client
Our client is an award-winning, profit-to-member industry super fund in Australia. It provides super, retirement, and advice options when needed to help its members feel confident on their journey to and through retirement.
Industry
Superannuation
Organisation size
500,000+ members
Location
Australia
Length of project
4 weeks
Challenge
Transforming regulatory scrutiny into exemplary member experience
In March 2025, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) issued a report citing failures and issues in how superannuation funds handle death benefit claims. The report identified a range of issues, including excessive delays, poor customer service and ineffective claims handling procedures. Of the claims reviewed, 78% had delays caused by processing issues within the control of the fund. The regulator issued 34 recommendations to ensure claims were processed in a timely, clear and respectful manner. It also signalled that it would review actions taken by all funds and launch civil penalty proceedings against funds over delays in processing death benefit claims.
In response to the landmark report, our client wanted to thoroughly examine its own death claims handling process and identify immediate opportunities for improvement to ensure its members would not face unnecessary delays or financial hardship during their period of mourning. This would enable the fund to provide an empathetic service to families, optimise internal staff workflows and clearly demonstrate to ASIC that it had taken proactive action on the report recommendations.
Superannuation funds rely on complex legacy systems for everything from member communications to day-to-day administration tasks. Updating these systems, without disrupting member experiences or breaching regulatory requirements, can be a difficult, time-consuming process. With significant experience accelerating digital transformation for superannuation funds, Equal Experts was engaged to help.
Solution
Understanding the current user journey and process bottlenecks
A small team worked with the superannuation fund to map the existing end-to-end user journey for death benefit claims, identify bottlenecks in the process and evaluate practical options for modernisation. During the engagement, we identified that the fund’s existing process was slow, with significant manual steps for both staff and grieving claimants, including:
- Claimants required to complete three separate and unconnected forms for a single claim, often repeating the same information multiple times.
- Staff completing multiple manual information transfers between disconnected systems.
- Manual process to generate emails and certify required documents.
These friction points meant claim resolution times often stretched over several weeks or months, adding additional distress to claimants at a time when financial clarity is critical. It also added an unnecessary administrative burden for the fund’s claims handling staff.
There were clear opportunities to create a modern, user-friendly and sensitive digital experience while also improving the data collection and verification process. By providing a single form for claimants to complete and provide all the relevant documents, alongside expanding existing document verification capabilities, we calculated that processing times could be reduced to around four weeks, well within the regulator’s guidance for payments within 90 days.
Preparing a path to digitisation
The team evaluated different digitisation options, including building a custom system or integrating existing workflow tools to accelerate the process and minimise risk. With the fund’s preference for custom-built, secure solutions over third-party tools, the team designed a customisable digital process that consolidated three legacy forms into one streamlined experience. Claimants could complete all necessary requirements in a single session, streamlining the data collection process while also providing a faster, simpler experience for the fund’s members.
To build the prototype rapidly, an AI-assisted development approach was adopted. Claude was used to generate code and accelerate the build, while experienced Equal Experts engineers applied human-in-the-loop oversight to review, improve and verify the AI outputs against strict security and quality standards.
Results
Accelerating regulatory compliance and elevating the member experience
In a focused, four-week engagement, Equal Experts worked with the fund to create a clear roadmap for regulatory compliance and improvements to the claims management process:
- Empathetic user journey and recommendations: We delivered a complete end-to-end map of the existing user journey and internal process. A full set of structured recommendations outlined how the fund could improve the death claims management process to address the recommendations made in the ASIC report. This included digitisation opportunities, workflow streamlining and, most significantly, user experience best practices to create a faster, more sensitive claims process.
- Functional prototype: We demonstrated a working digital claim form that simplified complex data capture for grieving families and ensured claims handling teams had the required information in one place, reducing the manual data transfers between disconnected systems.
- Quick win: We identified that an existing, but underutilised, death certificate verification process could be scaled for immediate impact. This would remove the burden on claimants to obtain and provide certified copies of key documents themselves, instantly reducing friction and building member trust.
Conclusion
The superannuation fund now has a clear understanding of its existing processes and a blueprint to modernise its services for bereaved members, alongside a functional prototype of an improved data collection form. Crucially, the fund’s executive leadership can demonstrate to ASIC that it has acted quickly on its death claim report recommendations and is establishing a modern, compliant, and empathetic claims process for grieving Australians.