Inside Super #5
Separating signal from noise: an account of our predictions
In this issue of Inside Super, we assess the accuracy of predictions we’ve made in our annual Forces at Work in Super Report.
We have started conducting interviews with senior executives from organisations that subscribe to the Report. Recently, when I outlined the proposed contents of next year’s edition, the CEO of a large fund said to me: ‘Everything that Right Lane said would come true has come true’, by which I think he meant we were probably the first to predict the industry structure that is (broadly) emerging, and perhaps the first to describe the means by which some profit to member funds would establish the strong market positions they now have.
As we get set up to draft the 14th edition of the Report, the CEO’s perhaps overly generous comment got me thinking about doing an accounting of our predictions. What did we get right? Where did we miss the mark? What is still to play out?
I’ve focused on a selection of predictions from the 2019-2021 reports – 5-7 years seems like a reasonable period to assess the extent to which these have proven to be accurate or not. The tables below show the predictions, ratings for each prediction (Right Lane’s and Chat GPT’s) and opinion/commentary about the accuracy of the predictions and what has played out.
The average of ChatGPT’s blind ratings was a little over 8/10. The AI’s assessment (noting possible ‘positivity bias’) was that the predictions showed consistently strong structural accuracy and a high level of foresight; that the most accurate through-lines were the calls on concentration and narrowing strategic pathways; and that the weakest predictive areas were those dependent on collective behaviour and coordination. The Right Lane ratings, done first, were slightly less favourable; but they were remarkably consistent with ChatGPT’s blind scores (Pearson correlation coefficient is ≈ 0.81).
2021 Report
2020 Report
2019 Report
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Not everything that Right Lane said would come true has come true, but we are proud of the accuracy of the predictions, which were, according to my AI cheerleader, ‘consistently strong and directionally correct, with only a small number of material misses’.
We hope you find these insights useful. Please send me any feedback and if you would like we can publish it with the next issue, attributed or not, as you wish.
With the release of our 2026 Forces at Work Report only months away, as mentioned above, we are in executive interview mode. If you wish to give an interview for the report, please get in touch.
About Inside Super
The focus of Inside Super is on superannuation industry strategy, structure, scale economies, competition and growth – topics central to the work Right Lane has been doing for more than 25 years. We won’t be building the content from scratch. We’ve been writing about forces at work in the industry for 13 years in our annual, subscriber-only Forces at Work in Super Report.
In each issue, I choose a chart or two from the back issues of the Report (there’s ~1,100 pages to draw from!), and connect them up with something that’s happening right now in, for example, the competitive arena or the policy discourse. I also make some observations and suggest some questions you and your team should contemplate.
With the 2025 Forces at Work Report having been recently released, we are in presentation mode. If you are wondering whether your organisation is a subscriber, and if so whether you can get a copy, or if you would like us to present some of the Report findings to your team, please let me know.
I plan on writing editions of Inside Super semi frequently. If you do not wish to receive these updates, please let me know via return email and I will take you off the list.
