Hostplus Brand Guidelines: A 1988 Hospitality Fund, Two Mergers and a Fund Open to All

Hotels, tourism, recreation and sport.

Hostplus is an Australian industry superannuation fund that began as the fund for hospitality workers. The advertising trade title B&T wrote in April 2017 that the fund was established in 1988 and described it as the industry fund for the hospitality, tourism, recreation and sport industries. English Wikipedia places its start in the early 1980s and associates its establishment and management with the hospitality union United Voice; the two accounts give different dates, so both are noted here.

The fund’s structure follows the industry-fund pattern. Its trustee is Host-Plus Pty Limited, with the Australian Business Register giving Melbourne as its main business location, and the fund operates alongside the Hostplus Pooled Superannuation Trust, which its governance pages describe as the vehicle through which it holds its investments. Hostplus says its board has equal representation from employee and employer organisations, plus three independent directors, and that it is responsible for the governance and strategic direction of the fund. Its governing rules, the fund says, sit in three documents: the trustee’s constitution and two trust deeds, one for the superannuation fund and one for the pooled trust. Advice services for members are provided through outside licensees that the fund names on its website, including Industry Fund Services.

Its company overview calls it “a profit-to-member Industry SuperFund, proudly run to benefit our members,” and its governance pages explain that the board sponsors and partners with organisations in the hospitality, tourism, recreation and sport industries it serves, on the basis that doing so helps attract and keep members.

Statewide in 2022, Maritime in 2023.

Hostplus grew sharply through two mergers in quick succession. The first was with Statewide Super, a South Australian fund. Hostplus’s own merger page says that on 29 April 2022 the two funds formalised their merger by completing a successor fund transfer, and that Statewide members and their employers joined what it then described as nearly 1.5 million members and 282,000 contributing employers. The fund said at the time that it expected the merger to bring greater scale and cost efficiencies, and that Statewide balances stayed invested through the transition period that began in early May 2022.

The second was with Maritime Super. English Wikipedia describes Maritime Super as the largest industrial fund focused on the maritime industry, with more than fifty years of existence, and says the merger was completed in September 2023. Hostplus’s pages for former Maritime members say balances were transferred from 1 September 2023, after Maritime Super’s fund identifier was switched off in late August, and that some Maritime products continued under new names inside Hostplus, among them accumulation categories for stevedores and for members who had joined the former Seafarers Retirement Fund, one of Maritime Super’s own predecessors.

Those mergers changed the fund’s scale. Hostplus now says it has more than two million members and more than 330,000 employers contributing; English Wikipedia, citing Canstar, describes it as of 2025 as the third largest Australian super fund by member accounts and the fifth largest by assets. The same page says that in 2023 the fund announced it would no longer offer stand-alone property and infrastructure options to members.

The product range, as the website presents it in 2026, runs from super accounts and pensions to services for employers and self-managed funds. Named offers include CPIplus, a pension investment option that aims to deliver a predetermined return above inflation each year under conditions the fund sets out, a Self-Managed Invest option for SMSF investors, the SuperSmart learning and advice service in Member Online, and a Hostplus app. The site also says Hostplus has won Canstar’s Outstanding Value Super Award for the eighth year in a row, a claim the fund makes on its own pages.

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 member-first voice and sector sponsorships.

The Hostplus voice is warm and direct. The 2026 homepage calls it “an industry super fund that puts you first,” says the fund is working towards “the financial future you deserve,” and invites members to “supercharge” their future through its advice tools. Those are the fund’s own phrases, written in the second person.

B&T reported in April 2017 that Hostplus had chosen Ogilvy Melbourne as its creative agency of record after a competitive pitch. The fund’s sponsorship policy, set out on its governance pages, ties its partnerships to the hospitality, tourism, recreation and sport industries it was built around.

The fund also uses its pages to talk to members about risk in plain language. In 2026 its homepage urged members to learn the warning signs of high-pressure super schemes, such as cold calling and exaggerated promises about returns, after the collapse of the First Guardian and Shield schemes.

For a design guide, Hostplus shows how a fund born in one service industry can keep that industry’s friendly, hospitable tone while growing into a fund open to everyone. Compare Cbus, another Melbourne industry fund with roots in one sector, and Rest, another Australian industry fund. For this guide we use deep plum, warm coral and sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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