HESTA Brand Guidelines: A 1987 Fund for Health and Community Services Workers

Health and community services, since 1987.

HESTA is an Australian industry superannuation fund for people who work in health and community services. Its website calls it “a specialist industry super fund with deep connections to health and community services workers and those who, like them, make our world better.” English Wikipedia dates its formation to 1987, and the ABC reported in December 2025 that the fund’s chief executive had described a 2025 systems project as “the largest technology project in HESTA’s 38-year history,” a span that counts from the same year.

The membership reflects the workforce the fund was set up for. English Wikipedia says around 80 per cent of its members are women. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) gave the membership as 1.1 million in December 2025 and described HESTA as one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds, and a HESTA release republished by Mirage News in October 2026 spoke of “more than one million members.”

The fund is run by a trustee company. Its website names the trustee as H.E.S.T. Australia Ltd, which holds the licence under which the fund operates. English Wikipedia describes the trustee’s board as drawn from both sides of the sector: six directors appointed by employees, six appointed by employers, an independent director and an independent chair. The website lists the directors on a board page, with the committees each one sits on, such as investment and risk.

Super with impact.

HESTA’s identity is built around a phrase. Its website uses “Super with impact,” marked as a trademark, and defines it as the outcome the fund aims for by “supporting our members to face the future with confidence, being a gutsy advocate for a fair and healthy community, and delivering investment excellence with impact.” Those three strands give the site its structure: the “About us” section divides into pages on facing the future with confidence, on advocacy, on investment and on reconciliation.

The fund’s most visible programme outside superannuation itself is the HESTA Awards. Its website lists three sets: the Nursing & Midwifery Awards, the Early Childhood Education & Care Awards and the Excellence Awards. The awards have their own section in the site’s main menu, next to the pages for members, employers and advisers, and the about page carries a quotation from a nurse who is a HESTA member, praising them.

Investment policy has also been part of how the fund presents itself. English Wikipedia records that HESTA removed all tobacco investments from its portfolios in 2013. The website has a page on reconciliation, and its footer acknowledges the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and pays respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Alongside its main product, the footer names HESTA Personal Super, and the October 2026 release mentions income stream accounts for members in retirement.

The website speaks to three audiences, with separate sections for members, employers and advisers, and a login menu that includes HESTA QuickSuper. The fund publishes annual reports and annual financial reports, a Member Outcomes Assessment, a retirement income strategy summary and target market determinations, all linked from its about and footer pages. Help is offered in more than fifteen languages, from Arabic and Greek to Vietnamese, through a “get help in your language” page.

Design and documentation.

Australian superannuation funds and wealth firms present themselves to members as much as to the public, and a fund’s identity has to work inside an account as well as in an advertisement: on a login screen, in an app, on a yearly statement and in an annual report. The funds in this guide tend to use friendly sans-serif wordmarks, and their palettes often reach for teal, purple, orange and navy.

Their language is member-first. Industry funds describe themselves as run for members, and many carry their origins in their names: a trade, a sector, a state or an employer. Mergers have blurred those names over time, and several funds now carry names that no longer point to a single industry or state. Their websites often say which workers a fund was set up for, even after it has opened to everyone.

The pictures follow the same idea. Fund websites and reports tend to show members at work and at home in everyday settings rather than buildings or products. The pages themselves are practical: what super is, how to join or combine accounts, retirement income, insurance in super, and member tools such as calculators and retirement planners, with annual reports and governance pages for those who look further.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each fund or firm: when it was founded, how it merged, who owns or runs it, and how regulators have dealt with it, with figures for members and assets given only as a dated source states them. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, and no logo or mark is reproduced.

A planned outage and a regulator’s conditions.

The most serious episode in the fund’s recent history came in 2025. At the start of April that year HESTA took its online services offline for a planned outage while it moved to a new administration provider, a platform the ABC named as GROW. The outage lasted about seven weeks. The ABC reported that contributions, investment switches, withdrawals and insurance claims could not be processed while it ran; the website came back at the start of June, but ABC Radio’s PM programme reported on 4 July 2025 that some members were still unable to get into their accounts.

On 11 December 2025 APRA announced that it had imposed additional licence conditions on H.E.S.T. Australia Ltd. The regulator said the transition, finalised in June 2025, “resulted in a severe, prolonged disruption to member services and caused direct harm to members,” and that it had identified deficiencies in the trustee’s board governance and management of risks. Under the conditions HESTA must carry out separate independent reviews of its risk management framework and of board effectiveness. In a statement reported by the ABC, the fund said it took the matters “very seriously” and was cooperating fully with the regulator, and apologised to members who had experienced delays.

By October 2026 the fund was presenting a different message. A HESTA release republished by Mirage News on 5 October 2026 announced lower investment fees and costs across most of its core investment options for the 2025–26 financial year, including its default MySuper Balanced Growth option, where it said most members are invested. Its website still leads with “Super with impact” and with the awards for the occupations its members work in.

For a design guide, HESTA shows how a fund can build its identity around the work its members do, through awards for nurses, midwives and early-childhood educators as much as through investment pages. Compare Aware Super, another Australian super fund, and AustralianSuper. For this guide we use a deep plum, a soft teal and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HESTA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.