Adviser Initiated Payments for pensions

On behalf of your clients, you can initiate online lump sum withdrawals, rollovers and ad hoc pension payments for eligible pension accounts only (excludes Term Allocated Pensions and Transition to Retirement pensions). 

Lump sum withdrawals and ad hoc pension payments will be one-off payments made independently of the existing payments your clients receive, and they won’t impact those arrangements. These payments will be paid out to your client’s nominated account.

Rollover payments can be paid to either a self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) or an APRA-regulated superannuation fund.
 

To initiate a pension payment, simply select the Make a payment button from your client's account in Adviser Online.
 

Maximum amount available to withdraw or rollover for Adviser Initiated Payments

• You can initiate a single withdrawal of up to $500,000, or a single rollover for any amount. 
• The maximum amount available for each request type:
  • Withdrawals: the lower value of the available cash balance, or the portfolio balance minus the product minimum and the pension minimum, or $500,000.
  • Rollovers: the lower value of the available cash balance, or the portfolio balance minus the product minimum and the pension minimum.
• Once you’ve initiated a payment, you'll be able to initiate another online payment after three days.
• There must be sufficient available cash in your client’s account for the payment to be made without any delays. If there isn’t enough cash available to make the payment, you’ll need to lodge asset sale orders before requesting the payment.
• As a security measure, you can only initiate payments into the bank account where we make your client’s regular pension payments. This is to ensure your client has authorised the bank account to receive the payments.

Some requests won’t be able to be submitted through Adviser Online, for example withdrawals above $500,000. If you are unable to submit a request through Adviser Online, see Requests that can’t be completed digitally to find out more about how to proceed with these requests.

Your client will need to approve rollovers of any amount, as well as lump sum withdrawals and ad hoc pension payments over $30,000 from their pension account via the Macquarie Authenticator app. Client approval is not required for lump sum withdrawals and ad hoc pension payments under $30,000 when paying to the nominated account. Your client will receive a notification from the app with the payment details.

To complete registration for Authenticator, your client must enable push notifications and complete all of the steps in the training simulator to finalise their set up.

See Macquarie Authenticator for more information.

Please note you can only make one payment every three days.

If you choose the lump sum withdrawal option:

• The payment will not count towards the annual minimum pension requirements
• If your client is under the age of 60, there may be different tax implications compared to their regular pension payments, and
• Your client’s transfer balance cap will be reduced by the amount of the payment.

If you choose the ad hoc pension payment option:

• The payment will count towards the annual minimum pension requirements, and
• If your client is under the age of 60, the payment will be taxed in the same manner as their other pension payments.

For clients under the age of 60, tax may apply on payments. All amounts selected will be net of any applicable tax. 

In other words, the amount you choose will be the amount they receive in their bank account. This means the amount that is withdrawn from their account may be higher. 

If your client is aged 60 or over at the time of the payment, tax is not applicable.

If there is enough available cash in the account to make the payment, your clients will generally receive the funds in one to three business days. This may be impacted by your client’s financial institution. 

In some instances, the amount of available cash at the time of the request will be higher than when we attempt to make the payment. This could happen if an investment trade is placed around the time of the payment request. 

In this situation, it will take longer for your client to receive the proceeds as we’ll need to wait for cash to become available again. 

We recommend not placing any trades if you intend to initiate these payments to avoid any delays.