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Product Research
How the Product Hub shortlists super funds, platforms and brokers, how it estimates each product's cost at an assumed balance, and what a recommendation assessment scores and creates when you lock it.
Updated 3 September 2026
What this screen is for
Product Hub runs in three stages. Three research tabs (Super Funds, Platforms, Brokers) need no client and let you browse the reference set and shortlist up to three products from one category. Compare Workspace opens once two products are shortlisted. Recommendation Assessment opens once a client is selected, and is where a shortlist becomes scored, client-specific rationale and, on lock, a recommendation in Advice. Locked tabs stay visible, with the reason they are locked written on the tab.
The household and client selectors at the top set the mode: “Research Mode” with no client, “Client Mode” with one. A client already active elsewhere in Aether is picked up when the page opens.
Research tabs
Each product is a card with its name, its type, a data-status badge, a sentence about where its figures come from, and four headline figures:
| Tab | Figures on the card |
|---|---|
| Super Funds | Admin fee as a percentage a year, fixed fee a year, insurance quality rating, number of investment options |
| Platforms | Admin fee shown as “From N% (tiered)”, which is the lowest bracket’s rate, then transaction fee, managed funds, ETFs |
| Brokers | Online brokerage, international access, options trading, cash rate |
The data-status badge reads Seed Only, Doc Pack Started, Pack Ready, Doc Backed or Published, from the product’s data profile; Seed Only means the comparison figures still come from seeded or manual data rather than a published document.
Search filters the cards by name as you type. + Compare adds a card to the shortlist. The shortlist holds at most three products, all from one category; a product from another category is refused until you clear the shortlist, and the card says so. The strip at the foot of the page shows the shortlist with Open Compare Workspace, Open Quick Table (the same rows as the workspace matrix, in a dialog), Clear Shortlist, and Send to Recommendation Assessment, which is enabled only with a client selected and at least two products shortlisted.
Compare Workspace
The workspace opens with a balance assumption, which defaults to $250,000 and drives every estimated cost on the page. Super fund comparisons also carry projection years (default ten, one to twenty) and an assumed growth rate (default 6% a year, zero to twelve). Broker comparisons show no balance box, because brokerage is charged per trade.
Four tiles sit above the matrix. Lowest Estimated Cost names the cheapest product that could be priced, or reads “Waiting on fee data” when none could. Broadest Choice counts investment options for super funds, managed funds plus ETFs for platforms, and markets for brokers. The other two tiles restate the client context and the shortlist size.
The comparison matrix has four rows, and in each the best product is highlighted: lowest estimated cost; broadest access; highest insurance rating for super funds or highest cash rate for platforms and brokers; and Data & Provenance (where each figure came from and when it was checked), which is never ranked. Each row expands to a per-product breakdown.
How cost is estimated
Platforms are priced on the server from the platform’s published fee brackets, marginally: each bracket’s rate applies only to the slice of the balance inside that bracket. The answer comes back in one of three states, and the page keeps them apart rather than showing $0 for any of them.
| The cost cell reads | Meaning |
|---|---|
| An amount a year, with the effective rate underneath | Priced from the brackets at the assumed balance |
| No admin fee schedule published | The platform has no brackets recorded; there is nothing to price |
| Published fee schedule cannot be priced | Brackets exist but are malformed, for instance a bracket with no rate; the reason is shown underneath |
| Fee estimate unavailable | The calculator has not answered yet, or the request failed |
A platform in any state but the first is left out of Lowest Estimated Cost. A platform has no fixed-fee or cap fields; the brackets are its only admin fee.
Super funds are priced on the page from four published figures: a percentage of balance, a fixed amount a year, a balance above which the percentage stops accruing, and a cap on the total. The cost is the percentage of the balance (up to the accrual ceiling) plus the fixed amount, then no more than the cap. A cap of zero is a genuine fee-free fund and prices as $0. If neither the percentage nor the fixed amount is published the cell reads “Fee not published”; a negative cap, or a figure that is not a number, reads “Published fee schedule cannot be priced”. The breakdown prints the formula that was applied so the summary and the working cannot disagree.
Brokers are ranked on their flat online brokerage, or the phone rate where no online rate is published. A broker that publishes a structured brokerage schedule (a flat fee, a percentage with a floor or cap, a ladder by trade size, or a base plus a percentage) has that schedule described in the breakdown, but it is never priced, because the workspace has a balance and no trade value. Such a broker is left out of Lowest Estimated Cost.
The super fund panels
Investment Option Lens shows, per fund, one investment option at a time: the fund’s default option where one is flagged, otherwise the first listed. It reports risk band, indirect cost ratio, growth allocation, and the longest published return — ten year, then five, then one — labelled with which of those it is.
Fee Cost Over Time shows what each fund’s admin fee has taken out of the assumed balance: the fee itself plus the growth those dollars never earned, measured against a fund charging no admin fee at the same growth. Every fund grows at the one assumed rate, so the fee is the only thing separating the lines. A fund whose fee cannot be priced is not drawn, and the chart names it, because drawing it as a free fund would put it above every fund that publishes a fee.
Include investment returns switches the same chart to a different question: what each fund would be worth, with each fund growing at its own selected investment option’s published return and paying its own admin fee. Published option returns are already net of investment costs, so the ICR is not deducted a second time — only the admin fee is. A fund whose selected option publishes no return history is not drawn, and the chart says so rather than growing it at the assumed rate, which would compare a real return against an invented one. The toggle is unavailable while no shortlisted fund’s selected option has a return loaded. Past returns are not a forecast.
Insurance Age sets the age the Support & Insurance lens answers for. With a client selected it is prefilled from their date of birth, and typing one overrides that.
With a client selected, each column of the matrix offers Mark Current and Mark Recommended. The same product cannot be both.
Recommendation Assessment
Send to Recommendation Assessment reuses the client’s unlocked draft of the same product type if one exists, otherwise creates one, and replaces that draft’s saved shortlist with the current one. The current product is the one you marked, or the draft’s existing current product. The recommended product is the one you marked; if you marked none and there is exactly one alternative to the current product, that alternative is taken. Each product is saved with a role (current, recommended or alternative), a one-line note, and its cost, access, support and data-status detail as they stood when sent. If the assessment has no adviser notes yet, a placeholder sentence is written for you to replace.
When an assessment is created without a current product, one is read from the client’s records:
| Assessment type | Current product read from |
|---|---|
| Super fund | The fund on the client’s highest-balance super account, matched by the fund’s record or, failing that, by name |
| Platform | The platform on the household’s highest-value investment asset |
| Broker | Nothing; there is no broker on the client’s records to read |
Scoring
Each assessment starts with a fixed set of criteria and weights for its type:
| Super fund | Platform | Broker |
|---|---|---|
| Admin Fees 30 | Admin Fees 30 | Brokerage Cost 35 |
| Insurance Quality 20 | Platform Breadth 25 | Market Access 25 |
| Investment Options 20 | Investment Options 20 | Platform Features 20 |
| Historical Performance 15 | Platform Features 15 | Cash Management 10 |
| Platform Features 10 | Regulatory / Security 10 | Regulatory / Security 10 |
| Regulatory / Security 5 |
You score the current product and the recommended product on each criterion from 0 to 10, and you can change weights and add notes per criterion. Weights must total exactly 100: the page refuses to save otherwise, and the server refuses too. The overall score is the weight-averaged recommended score; the current fit is the same over current scores; improvement is the difference; and each row’s improvement is its score difference times its weight.
Assessments are listed newest first, each marked DRAFT or LOCKED.
What Lock creates
Lock Advice Output for SOA is available only when a recommended product is set. It asks you to confirm, saves the scores first, and then creates one recommendation with one strategy in Advice:
- The title is “Replace” followed by the product type, the current product and the recommended product. The summary and rationale say the recommended product replaces the current one.
- The impact line carries the weighted assessment score out of ten.
- The strategy is of type investment, at priority 50, marked as created by hand, and tagged as a product replacement.
- Three fixed alternatives are recorded: do nothing, look for a cheaper product, and make the minimum change rather than a full switch.
The assessment is then locked: its scores and notes are read-only, it cannot be deleted, and the panel links to Advice. A locked assessment cannot be updated through any route.
What this page does not do
- Price brokerage for a trade. Schedules are described, never evaluated, because no trade value exists on this page.
- Quote insurance. The Support & Insurance lens shows a fund’s published default cover for the age you set — the cover amount, the annual premium and the age band each came from — and nothing else. It does not interpolate between bands, price for occupation, gender, smoking status, waiting period or benefit period, or produce a figure for an age no published band covers. Where a fund’s cover rows have not been loaded it says so, which is not the same as the fund having no cover.
- Add cover amounts together. A death lump sum and an income-protection benefit are different units, and the catalogue does not record the period an income-protection figure is quoted over, so only the annual premiums are totalled.