SMSF trustees are looking for particular characteristics and features from service providers when looking to make a portfolio allocation to digital assets such as cryptocurrency, a key industry stakeholder has confirmed.
“An SMSF is a long-term investment vehicle for an individual’s retirement, so when investing in digital assets, they’re looking for trusted partners where they can invest, where they can trust that all the paperwork and compliance is going to be sorted out and they don’t have to be juggling the historical cold wallet issues where a lot of the reporting duties fall back on them,” SuperConcepts chief executive Andrew Row told delegates at the Digital Economy Conference 2026 in Sydney today.
“So what they’re looking for is technology and administration solutions that take away a lot of [those tasks] and make digital assets really behave like a [conventional] asset allocation.
“So custodial platforms and registries, like Coinbase, technology like SuperConcepts [provides] and administration connecting all the way through to the regulatory back end through audit [is what they’re after].”
Row pointed out these demands emanate from the key motivation of investment control SMSF trustees exhibit whereby they can focus on this aspect of running their own super fund and not so much on the administrative and compliance obligations for which they are responsible.
Further, he observed while there is a willingness to invest in digital assets among an increasing number of SMSF trustees, many of them do not know how to do it.
“So what they’re looking for is education, they’re looking for platforms, they’re looking for providers that plug everything [in] together seamlessly so that they can make the [investment] choices they want to make,” he noted.
He acknowledged SMSF portfolio allocations to digital assets are still relatively low and this presents a solid opportunity for service providers in that space.
“There are about $1 trillion of assets held across 650,000 funds and less than half a per cent of those are allocated to digital assets,” he said.
“So that’s a real opportunity [and the allocations] have certainly been growing over the last few years, but we’re now at an inflection point.”
Darin Tyson-Chan
Editor
Darin is the founder and publisher of Benchmark Media, an independent publishing house whose mastheads include financialobserver, selfmanagedsuper and smstrusteenews. He has been covering the financial services space for over a decade and in this time he has worked for a variety of trade publications. Darin has also written for the Money section published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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