Using technology to maintain growth and deliver for members

Spirit Super recognised the impact technology played in its offer and wanted to position itself to be able to deliver the best possible service and experience for its members. 

Formed in April 2021, following the merger of Tasplan and MTAA Super, Spirit Super had grown significantly in a relatively short space of time and needed to be able to maintain growth while continuing to deliver for its members. It recognised that its current technologies were reaching a ceiling and could not be relied upon to navigate the complex climate.  It needed to act quickly to stay competitive as well as grow and scale in the future.

Spirit Super’s technology strategy was all about advancing the organisation and readying itself for further growth and merger opportunities. The development team were eager to move from their current system of monolithic, tightly coupled desktop applications to cloud-based solutions, but finding the time and capacity to implement this was proving to be challenging. 

Due to the limitations of the on-prem systems, which required manual deployment across multiple environments and at times could suffer from poor performance, the team at Spirit Super were spending up to 95% of their time fire-fighting or dealing with business-as-usual issues. This left them with little time to deliver new and value-adding features, let alone consider the best way to move their entire platform to the cloud in a secure and efficient way.

Noting this lack of capacity, Spirit Super wanted to engage a partner who had the experience and know-how to guide the team along the journey, point out dead ends and help the team to do the right thing the first time.

Establishing a steel thread by migrating a single capability into the cloud

When you onboard a new member of staff, it’s useful to be able to get through the HR admin quickly and efficiently, including setting up their super account. Anything which slows down this process, including unreliable, cumbersome or slow member registration systems, can be frustrating and could impact an employer’s choice of super fund or the super fund’s reputation.

We advised Spirit Super to consider event-driven architecture to maximise the results the team needed. With event-driven architecture the team would be able to operate real-time transactions and data, have high resilience thanks to a decoupled architecture pattern and enable the faster delivery of new features and fixes.

As a proof of concept for the event-driven architecture solution design, we worked collaboratively with Spirit Super to create a new capability in the cloud – a service enabling third parties to register new members. 

This steel thread enabled the team at Spirit Super to utilise the new SDLC processes and develop their understanding of cloud computing, event-driven architecture, infrastructure as code and automated testing while also demonstrating the business value in the solution design. A partnership model enabled Equal Experts to embed members within the Spirit Super team, providing opportunities for pair programming, coaching and on-hand support on an active project within the business. 

We engaged Spirit Super’s various third-party providers to understand, clarify and map out each provider’s requirements, use cases and workflows. This was then utilised to generically define and create an Open API specification for a publicly exposed member service supporting third parties to integrate with Spirit Super when onboarding or registering new employees with the super fund. 

A data pipeline was built with Kafka which pulled membership data into a secure, private cloud and was used by the API to determine if the applicant already had an account with Spirit Super. This enabled third parties to call the new API without requiring the on-prem systems to be available. The API was hosted in Microsoft Azure and the solution allowed all data changes to be captured as events, which enabled the system to be easily extended over time with new capabilities as and when required by the business.

This approach also introduced additional benefits to Spirit Super’s development including improved and automated testing frameworks for unit, functional and end-to-end tests, built-in auditing and logging and more robust processes. 

We also worked closely with the wider IT teams to set expectations on the design and implementation of cloud architecture, security and networking to ensure it would meet compliance requirements and vital security considerations.

A modern approach to delivering software

By implementing event-driven architecture alongside the successful proof of concept use case and upskilling their internal team on ways of working, we provided Spirit Super with the building blocks for the next generation of its technology. 

Through the engagement, Spirit Super gained a deeper understanding of event-driven architecture and crucial advice on high-level architecture that would not only support the first steps of its journey but also how it could evolve the architecture in the future.  Rather than spending years trialling different options and solutions, encountering frequent roadblocks or delays, Spirit Super was able to forge a direct path to success by working with Equal Experts to understand what good looks like, gain different perspectives and use tried and tested technologies. 

Spirit Super now has an ongoing framework to extend and continue the migration of more capabilities into the cloud and reduce its dependency on on-prem systems, which comes with resiliency, scalability and significant performance benefits. Due to security patches and other updates being applied to on-prem servers, Spirit Super’s systems can be unavailable for up to 45 minutes each month. Anyone wishing to sign up via the third-party member registration service during this period would be unable to do so or would receive an error message, with this poor user experience resulting in members being lost if they decided to choose another provider. By implementing a cloud-native solution with no direct dependency on on-prem systems, Spirit Super has experienced zero downtime, with enhanced availability and consistent response times. This improved user experience has meant no members have dropped out of the registration process since its introduction.

The processes and approaches introduced during the Equal Experts engagement are now being adopted by the wider technology team at Spirit Super, with those who worked closely with Equal Experts acting as advocates for the approach and coaching colleagues. This expansion of knowledge sharing across the technology team, alongside a new platform that can be extended and expanded quickly and easily,  is helping the business respond to the ever-changing superannuation landscape while continuing to deliver value for its members.