Technology has a well-known habit of disrupting even the most old-school entrenched industries. The way we shop, communicate, and bank have all been revolutionised by digital innovation. 

Now, with frequently changing regulatory frameworks, increasing competition and higher expectations from their members, superannuation funds are the latest sector to embrace the opportunities that improved modern technology practices can offer. 

Super funds want to be closer to their members, understand employment journeys better and deliver tailored experiences and advice which will help everyday Australians be financially prepared for retirement. But they also need to have cost-effective, reliable and adaptable systems. 

This is where event-driven architecture comes into play.

Delivering change in the real world with event-driven architecture

Event-driven architecture is a way of building your services. It uses events, such as a new member signing up, or updating their employment details to trigger and communicate between decoupled services. For example, a member updating their status to “maternity leave” can become an event which can be understood by other services and automatically triggers other actions such as pausing any unnecessary fees on the account or sending a tailored advice email.

Decoupled microservices are configured to consume events and perform actions with limited interdependency – providing significant benefits. A lack of interdependence means you can respond to change rapidly and with reduced risk to business-critical infrastructure. Businesses can rapidly spin up new capabilities or make changes to meet regulatory obligations with less time and effort required for testing and deployment.  Consolidating multiple flows of information in real-time can also help create deeper visibility of the organisation or its customers. 

Event-driven architecture provides greater flexibility, scalability, and agility with lower overall cost of ownership internally. We’ve used our expertise to help numerous organisations in Australia adopt event-driven architecture and reap these rewards for their business. 

As Xinja’s technology partner, we used event-driven architecture to help build a digital neobank from scratch. Xinja embraced microservices and events to deliver a better, personalised experience for its customers without being weighed down by the overheads of a  cumbersome, difficult-to-maintain IT system. 

We also supported an Australian employee software company to use event-driven architecture to get their platform ready for future scale. In just three months we demonstrated best practices within event-driven architecture, upskilled the team on platform functionality and set up monitoring and alerting to support operations, enabling the team to feel confident and prepared for rapid growth.

Accelerating digital transformation for superannuation funds

For superannuation funds, embracing digital transformation and utilising event-driven architecture can have significant benefits not only for the fund itself but also for its members. 

Using technology to help people understand and act on their super fund balance and make it easier for families to proactively manage their super fund account during big life changes is something that the team here at Equal Experts Australia and New Zealand is particularly passionate about.

It’s why we’ve used our knowledge and experience in event-driven architecture to create our Super Accelerator – a package of predefined, ready-to-use modules that superannuation funds need to help build, deploy and run event-driven services. 

Our 12-week super accelerator empowers super funds to leverage the benefits of event-driven architecture and cloud technology to create new services safely and at speed, deploy and integrate quickly and maintain systems with a lower total cost of ownership for the infrastructure.

For Spirit Super, the accelerator has been a foundation for the team to deliver new, value-adding features quickly in a reliable and scalable way. In just 12 weeks we helped the team begin decoupling its monolithic desktop applications and deliver its first cloud-based event-driven microservices – a third-party member registration service. Leveraging the benefits of event-driven architecture meant a third party could integrate with the system in just 2 days, down from 8 weeks, enabling Spirit Super, its partners and members to start seeing the benefits almost immediately.