About $375 million has shifted from the ASB-owned Aegis wrap to a new FNZ-built investment administration platform launched by the Boutique Advisers Alliance (BAA) last year.
The BAA, formed by the Hastings-based Stewart Group in 2015 to provide aggregated services to independent advisory firms, currently boasts six member firms.
Nick Stewart, head of the Stewart Group and BAA director, said the new custodial platform offered “cutting edge technology” as well as the benefits of independent ownership.
Stewart said the BAA began building the new platform in collaboration with FNZ last July, while also hiring former Compac head of global ICT, Tim Rowe, in November to manage the new service.
“We decided to paddle our own waka and be in control of our own custodial wrap platform,” he said in a statement. “During my tour of the US last year I saw how automation and technology were driving their businesses, and that validated the decision to move to our own next generation platform.”
As well as providing the necessary custodial “firewall” between the adviser and client assets, Stewart said the new BAA platform streamlines both administrative and legal requirements such as tax, anti-money laundering and discretionary investment management service (DIMS) reporting.
He said the new service “handles all cash, script and units, and also enables economies of scale so our clients get a better deal through sharper pricing on brokerage, call account interest rates and underlying forex margins”.
The platform also offers daily data feeds to the BAA client relationship management system, Stewart said, which automates “administratively heavy services”.
“[We can] provide a more efficient service to clients and more one on one adviser to client time,” he said. “It’s a game-changer for us and our associate advisory businesses.”
In addition to the Stewart Group, BAA members include: Cliffe Consulting; Strategic Wealth Management; Fiona Judd; Red Wealth; and, G3 Financial Freedom.
BAA began moving the assets across from Aegis to the new platform late last year.
Aegis also lost a major client in 2016 after Macquarie (now Hobson Wealth Partners) defected to the NZX Wealth Technologies (formerly Apteryx) platform.