Superannuation is usually a widely ignored aspect of financial life, particularly at a young age.
You or your employer sets up a fund, they whack some cash in there every time you get paid, some magic happens and when you’re old af, it pays for you to live a life without work. NOICE!
Given the importance of super, it’s pretty staggering that we just let it work away in the background without any thought of where our money is being invested and if it aligns with our personal values. On top of that, traditional funds are largely way behind the times, with most still sending out regular mail like a bunch of Luddites.
Only Ralph cares about your archaic mail.
Enter Spaceship, the superannuation startup with a technology focus who have just announced a huge $1.6 million in seed funding. Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes is just one of the investors who are keen as bloody mustard to get involved.
When they launch, Spaceship plan to invest heavily in technology rather than the big banks and mining stocks that many traditional funds favour. On top of these relevant investment options, they plan to give customers the ability to do everything they need to via their AI driven application because fuck paper.
We had a chat with co-founder and CEO Andrew Sellen to get an idea of where the idea came from and some rad features of the app.
“If you ask anyone our age where their super is they’ve generally got no idea. You ask them what companies they own via their super and obviously no clue as well,” he said.
“We believe people should know what they own through their super and more so that the most sensible thing and the best thing for the coming decades of investment is to invest with a technology focus.”
Andrew says this focus is far more in-line with our generation of meme-loving tech addicts.
Yep, that’s us.
“We’ve created this super fund that’s really targeted at people our own age between the sort of 18 to 35 age bracket with this idea that we use technology everyday, people catch Ubers everyday and using Snapchat for better or worse every hour, so we believe these are the companies that are gonna thrive over the coming decades and we wanna be invested in them,” he said.
With a background in superannuation, Andrew says the idea was discussed where most great ideas sprout – over an ice cold frothy.
“I started to think about how people of my age are typically unengaged with their super and don’t even know where it is and what would it take for a product to engage people?”
So that’s when I decided I’m gonna start a super fund. I had a beer with my mate Dave and said hey, we should start a super fund and he said, absolutely, let’s do that.”
In terms of what you can do via the app, it looks to be pretty much anything you can think of.
“Everything will happen via the app,” he said.
“The basis of it is gonna be an artificially intelligent chat bot that helps you get to know your super.”
You’ll be able to see exactly what you own via the app. That means even down to stock level you’ll know an approximate dollar amount of Apple shares that you own.”
But the best and most relevant feature for the younger crowd has to be the ability to instantly transfer superannuation from other accounts into your Spaceship fund super easily.
“There’s a lot of people who’ve had a bunch of different jobs, they’ve kinda lost track and don’t even know where their other super is. So we’ll be able to find it instantly when you sign up with the app and you can transfer those other accounts to Spaceship automatically with one tap,” he said.
Andrew says the funding will help primarily with getting the fund off the ground and the plethora of stuff that entails.
Photo: Supplied.
