Superannuation provider Australian Retirement Trust (ART) has revealed details of its recently launched digital onboarding tool – an automated solution to help employers align with new super fund stapling obligations.

The ‘industry first’ Super Fund Onboarding (SFO) tool is designed to streamline the onboarding process for employers, ensuring new employees can be automatically linked to their super fund of choice – in this case, ART.

ART chief growth officer, Dave Woodall, said the tool provides a “fully trackable and seamless employee onboarding journey – eliminating errors and data inaccuracies”, and ensures employers can more easily meet new superannuation fund stapling obligations.

Part of the Federal Government’s Your Future, Your Super obligations, introduced in November 2021, the stapling obligations require employers to check and confirm whether a new employee has an existing superannuation fund that can be paid into. This ensures new employees are not simply joined to a workplace super fund and can be easily linked up to an existing fund, rather than paying multiple fees for superfluous accounts.

Developed by beam, an ART-owned superannuation software developer, the SFO tool, according to Woodall, “lightens the administration load when onboarding new employees”.

Since its launch in October this year, ART notes that more than 1,500 employers are now using the tool.

“We’ve received excellent feedback from our employers that the tool is intuitive to use, with the support material clear and easy to understand,” Woodall said.

He added that “thousands more employers” are expected to make use of the SFO digital tool over the coming months.

ART is a $200 billion superannuation fund formed in early 2022 through the merger of Sunsuper and QSuper.