In the fifth year of the SMSF Awards, a clear point of difference between winners and their competitors is emerging: advisers and accountants are increasingly favouring those service providers who have a distinct focus and speciality on SMSF services.

The majority of this year’s winners told SMSF Adviser that the key to their success is having detailed, up-to-date and specialist knowledge and services for their professional client base.

First-time winner of SMSF administrator, Keep It Simple Super, told SMSF Adviser that it’s their focus on superannuation and SMSFs that their clients like about them.

“We stick to our knitting and we don’t waste time trying to be everything to everyone,” said Keep It Simple Super director, Julie Taylor.

It’s a similar story of specialisation for ASF audits, who have again won SMSF audit provider of the year.

“We will continue to focus our energy on developing next-generation SMSF audit technology, as well as investing in our most important resource — our SMSF audit team, based in Adelaide,” said ASF Audits marketing manager Ben Atkins.

In the post-reform world, SMSF professionals also indicated that technical assistance and personalised services is a major factor in choosing service providers.

For this year’s actuarial certificate provider of the year winner, Act2 Solutions, bespoke technical advice has always been a major focus.

“The Act2 team see ourselves as an extension of our clients’ teams, working with them to help ensure that they’re able to give the best service to their customers,” said Act2’s managing director, Andy O’Meagher.

As with years gone past, having efficient and updated interfaces and platforms was also a major consideration for clients when choosing their service providers. For the SMSF software provider of the year, BGL, useability is central to their design and development process.

“Our software uniquely provides instant feedback mechanisms for clients to tell us at all stage of the journey what they like and don’t like,” said BGL’s managing director Ron Lesh.

SMSF Adviser would like to thank the 1,900-strong respondents to the SMSF Awards survey, and look forward to celebrating a buoyant market of service providers again next year.