In 2024, Australia's financial regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), announced that dozens of pension products offered by financial group AMP Ltd. failed its annual performance test. The majority of these failed products were repeat offenders, marking their second consecutive failure in the rigorous assessment designed to identify and weed out underperforming investments.
Specifically, APRA indicated that all but one of the 37 products that failed the 2024 test belonged to AMP. This significant number of failures from a single institution highlights ongoing concerns within the Australian superannuation sector regarding product performance and consumer protection.
While this particular Bloomberg article focuses on the 2024 results for AMP, subsequent annual performance tests in 2025 continued to see products from major Australian financial institutions, including AMP, Insignia Financial (owner of MLC), and Bendigo Bank, failing APRA's assessments. These failures, particularly among platform trustee-directed products, have led to calls from institutions like AMP for an overhaul of the testing methodology, arguing that the current parameters are flawed and can lead to "perverse outcomes" and potential consumer harm.
