Case Study: GigSuper Superannuation Integration

Short form

Superannuation for self-employed people, completed in one app in about fifteen minutes, by connecting GigSuper to an established super administrator rather than building a fund from scratch.

The challenge

Self-employed people retire with roughly 80% less in savings than full-time employees, and the reasons are structural. They hold larger cash reserves, so money doesn't flow to super. Signing up to a fund involves a pile of manual steps that an employer would normally do for them. And every process inside an existing super fund assumes you are a full-time employee — so for the roughly one in ten workers who aren't, every interaction is subtly broken. GigSuper could see the need, but didn't have the funding to build an entire superannuation management system from scratch.

What we built

Rather than recreate everything behind the scenes, we spent the discovery effort working through how to meet this market's genuinely unique needs, then connected the pieces that already existed: one of the big four banks (operating as a branch, so members could build rainy-day savings), an established superannuation administration system for the legal machinery, insurance systems for self-employed cover, and Australian Government services for identity verification. All of it surfaced through one simple app, launched at the start of 2020.

The outcome

A sign-up process that took four to six weeks — multiple letters, proof of identity, forms designed for employers — became a ten-minute in-app experience. The approach sharply reduced the cost of starting the venture, because GigSuper leveraged a third party's existing operations instead of building them; for the administrator it opened a whole new market with no investment on their part. And for a segment every other fund ignores, something confusing became easy — and a path to retiring with dramatically more.

Related

Suggested image

A tradesperson sitting in a ute at the end of the day, calmly finishing super signup on their phone.