Around 605,000 self-managed super funds operate in Australia and roughly 12,000 accountants and specialist administrators provide setup, restructure or wind-up services. Almost every step that involves forming the corporate trustee, drafting the trust deed or moving member balances is a designated service from 1 July 2026.
Where SMSFs trip up CDD
- Trustee verification — corporate trustees require ASIC extract, director ID checks and beneficial-owner unwrapping for the underlying members.
- Member identification — every member is a beneficial owner by definition; verify all of them at establishment, not just the primary contact.
- Source-of-funds for rollovers above A$200k — confirm the receiving fund and the rationale, especially where the rollover follows a divorce or property settlement.
- Related-party loans (LRBAs) — document the lender, the security arrangement and any guarantor.
The monitoring rules that matter
Most SMSF administration platforms (Class, BGL, Supermate) don't run AML monitoring natively — you need to wire CDD outcomes into a separate workflow or rely on a full-suite provider with an SMSF-aware schema. The five rules every administrator should run from day one are listed in our transaction monitoring guide; the SMSF-specific addition is a flag for any contribution materially above the contribution caps for the member's age band.