Investment News

BT Financial Group NZ inked a healthy $35.4 million dividend for Westpac for the year ending March 31 even as the Australian bank continues its wealth management exit apace. The BT NZ contribution, coming largely off the back of the bank-owned $9 billion plus KiwiSaver scheme, remains something of an outlier across the Westpac group… [Read More…]

Respected financial services industry figure, Tracey Berry, has added to the growing partner ranks at specialist consulting firm, Mosaic Financial Services Infrastructure. Berry, most recently on contract as regulatory compliance manager for TSB, has a long history in the bank-based wealth management sector. She led the wealth divisions of Westpac, BNZ and Kiwibank (encompassing a… [Read More…]

The NZ managed funds market went backwards during three months ending March 31 in the first negative quarter for two years. New figures released by the Reserve Bank of NZ (RBNZ) last Friday show total funds under management (FUM) fell from more than $264 billion at the end of 2021 to about $257.3 billion by… [Read More…]

In a portent of the looming step up in the adviser-licensing regime, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) has fired off another compliance reminder. The new FMA ‘information sheet’ released last week details best-practice record-keeping expectations for financial advice providers (FAP). James Greig, FMA director supervision, said in a release that previous regulatory monitory of the… [Read More…]

Passive funds have built momentum on the win-win premise of low-cost market benchmarked products but a new study confirms the undoubted winners of the seemingly unstoppable trend: indexers. Global index providers saw an aggregate year-on-year revenue increase of almost a quarter in 2021 as demand for passive products, notably exchange-traded funds (ETFs), soared over the… [Read More…]

Fund managers need better ways to assess corporate exposure to supply chain worker exploitation but the embryonic NZ modern slavery legislative proposal is deeply flawed, according to Nikko Asset Management NZ chief, George Carter. “The government has shoe-horned the somewhat emotive term ‘and worker exploitation’ into the bill, and whilst at first glance this may… [Read More…]

Jeremy Grantham’s ‘wild rumpus’ appears to have well and truly begun. But it might only be the beginning of a gloomy period for markets. Grantham, chief investment strategist of GMO and part-time prophet of doom, has been unusually quiet of late. One would expect the severe market dislocation we’ve been experiencing since the start of… [Read More…]

Conditions are ripe for traditional financial services businesses to snatch back market share lost to more nimble technology players over the last decade, global consultancy firm, Oliver Wyman, argues in its latest annual review of the sector. The 2022 ‘State of the financial services industry’ paper says monetary tightening combined with flagging tech valuations opens… [Read More…]

Bitcoin claims to ‘safe-haven’ asset status will come under increasing pressure as liquidity drains from the system over the next few months, according to the latest State Street Digital Digest. Following up on its launch edition last year, the State Street Digital publication flags shrinking liquidity as posing “an even bigger test for bitcoin, than… [Read More…]