The general manager of South Australia’s largest superannuation fund, Super SA, John O’Flaherty has called for regulatory changes to allow superannuation funds to provide limited financial advice.

O’Flaherty told a Pensions and Investments Summit on the Gold Coast that he believed such changes were necessary to meet the needs of members who required guidance which fell short of the fully-fledged advice provided by financial planners.

However, he pointed out that Super SA was already providing its members with access to financial planners via an arrangement with Industry Funds Financial Planning (IFFP), with the cost of the advice being extracted from their superannuation accounts.

He said that in the past 12 months around 1,000 Super SA members had accessed the IFFP service at an average cost of about $1,800.

O’Flaherty said the financial planning service was closely monitored by the fund to ensure only those people who needed fully-fledged advice actually accessed the service.

He said that if regulatory provision was made to allow for limited advice, it should not be restricted to questions relating to superannuation.

“A lot of the questions we get relate to taxation,” he said. “Superannuation is very simple, it is the taxation which makes it complicated.”