Optimising Death-Benefit Claims: What Super Funds Can Learn from Banking
/Based on presentation by Sarah Poole and Ben Darlow from estateXchange
Death-benefit claims are one of the most emotionally charged and administratively complex areas within superannuation. Despite super funds doing everything possible to support members during life, once a member dies, processes often fall into what Sarah Poole aptly described as a “world of friction and paper”.
In our recent CREW webinar, estateXchange Founder and Co-CEO Sarah Poole and Product Executive Ben Darlow shared hard-earned insights from transforming deceased-estate processes in one of Australia’s major banks and from working with super funds now facing similar pressures.
The sector is changing — and expectations are rising
Sarah and Ben witnessed firsthand the transformation of deceased-estate handling after the Hayne Royal Commission and subsequent banking reforms. Public expectations increased sharply. Audits intensified. Boards began asking tougher questions. Superannuation is now experiencing this same spotlight.
Super funds want to:
Protect members' wishes
Deliver compassionate service
Remain compliant
Manage costs
Mitigate fraud and risk
However right now, processes are often inconsistent, paper-heavy, and slow - particularly when a grieving family must deal with dozens of organisations.
Focus on what matters most: Customer experience
Ben emphasised that organisations often say compliance comes first but in practice, customer experience must lead.
Why? Because when customer experience fails, complaints escalate, delays mount, breaches increase, and complexity multiplies.
The key pillars for redesigning processes:
Customer experience
Regulatory compliance
Operational risk
Every system, workflow, process and reporting layer should align to these priorities - in that order. Not all cases are equal — and treating them the same creates inefficiency. The 80/20 rule is that 80–90% of cases are straightforward and 10–20% are genuinely complex and time-consuming
What many organisations do wrong. They push all cases through the same “pipe,” slowing everything down. The solution: Early triage. Super funds should identify complexity as early as possible. Complexity markers may include:
Asset value
Likelihood of complaint
Multiple products or accounts
Complicated family structures
Disputed estates
Indicators of fraud
This ensures:
Simple cases flow through quickly
Complex cases get expert attention
Resources (and costs) are used intelligently
Risk settings must be brutally realistic
There is a common pattern across financial services. Organisations over-engineer processes to prevent extremely rare risks and create massive cost blowouts and delays.
Examples they include over-designed forms (four attempts needed to get them right), chasing minor mismatches in signatures, rigid KYC interpretations and unnecessarily low probate thresholds.
Ben’s message was “If you’ve never had a failure, your risk settings are probably too tight.” Super funds sometimes become so cautious that claims slow to a crawl increasing member dissatisfaction and inflating unit costs.
Reporting must move from anecdote to evidence
Executives and boards want visibility but without structured data and good reporting, the narrative can be skewed by “the one bad case.”
Good reporting should clearly classify cases by type and complexity, show where delays occur, identify breach risks early, surface systemic issues and highlight the 98% of cases that go well. This shifts conversations from fear-based to fact-based.
People and culture are as important as processes
Sarah spoke passionately about the human side of change. The team she inherited had repeated change fatigue, processes done to them rather than with them, resistance to new systems and no shared vision. Her advice:
Co-design the vision with the team
This builds ownership and alignment across KPIs, roadmaps, and customer outcomes.
Invest in capability
Take staff “off the tools” long enough to train them properly even when SLAs are tight.
Create internal coaching roles
These support consistent ways of working and allow talent to progress.
Listen to calls and review complaints together
This drives both accountability and empathy across all levels of the team.
The ecosystem is broken and estateeXchange is addressing it
The average deceased person has 37 accounts, assets or services to unwind: banks, super funds, insurers, utilities, telcos, share registries, government bodies and digital assets. Families, or the professionals assisting them, must contact each one individually, repeating the same process again and again.
estateXchange solves for this by:
Providing a secure, shared workspace
Allowing documents to be uploaded once and reused across multiple organisations
Integrating directly with the Australian Death Check
Enabling real-time verification of identity
Reducing fraud risk
Reducing duplicated effort
Improving experience for bereaved families
Lowering costs for institutions
This kind of system-level reform will be essential as Australia moves through a $5.4 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer over the next 20 years.
Conclusion
The message is clear: Death-benefit claims don’t have to be slow, paper-heavy and distressing. With smarter triage, realistic risk settings, strong reporting, cultural investment and ecosystem-level collaboration, super funds can dramatically improve both efficiency and humanity in this critical process.
For any further information, please contact Sarah Poole or Ben Darlow at estateXchange.