ANZ has lost its crown as the largest retail funds manager in the country, according to revised figures in a long-running sector survey.
The Plan for Life (PFL) December 2024 quarterly NZ retail fund report shows ANZ fell to second on the table behind ASB for the first time during the period as the Australian research house corrected a more than $9 billion historical anomaly.
PFL counted ANZ retail fund assets at almost $25.4 billion at the end of last year compared to the roughly $26.2 billion for ASB. Just about all of the ANZ retail funds are sourced from KiwiSaver where the manager held a little under $22 billion as at December 31, 2024.
In the September quarter report, the researcher valued the ANZ retail funds at about $34.7 billion, implying a massive $9.3 billion went AWOL at the bank-owned manager during the final three months of 2024.
But a PFL spokesperson said the $9 billion plus hole in the ANZ assets followed a review of the reported funds that identified a couple of legacy products in the mix that were “not only somewhat questionable as retail products but ANZ stopped providing data on them a couple of years ago”.
“The decision was made to remove them from our database entirely.”
In particular, the updated survey figures strip out an ANZ private banking product that held about $8.5 billion of funds under management.
As reported last week, ANZ offloaded more than $550 million of its legacy SIL superannuation funds to Mercer in April: the bank also exited the wholesale market last year, releasing some $3.5 billion to competitors in funds not included in the PFL survey.
However, even after deleting the legacy, possibly non-retail, funds from the historical series, ANZ was still slightly ahead of ASB as at September 30 last year with about $25.3 billion and $25.2 billion under management, respectively.
The revised PFL data shows ANZ reported the slowest growth by far among the top 10 managers for both the December quarter (0.5 per cent) and 2024 calendar year (6 per cent): by contrast, ASB grew funds under management by 4 per cent over the three-month period and 18.5 per cent annually.
FirstCape (comprising the BNZ and Harbour Asset Management funds) reported the strongest quarterly growth of 10.8 per cent to cracking through the $10 billion threshold to end the period at $10.7 billion: usual suspects, Milford (8.8 per cent) and Simplicity (8.6 per cent) also grew at more than twice the rate as the rest of the top 10 field in the December quarter.
Simplicity also recorded the highest annual growth figure of 32 per cent followed closed by Milford (31.1 per cent) with FirstCape (23.1 per cent) trailing in third, according to the PFL data.
Bar ANZ (up 6 per cent in 2024) all other named managers reported double-digit growth last year, ranging from 12.6 per cent for Fisher Funds to the Booster result of 18.9 per cent.
The cohort of smaller, unnamed, managers also turned-in above-average results for the quarter (8.8 per cent) and year (35.6 per cent).
Overall, the PFL study shows the NZ retail funds market grew 20.6 per cent during 2024 and 5.2 per cent in the final quarter of the year to close the period at about $214.5 billion.
“Year on year Gross Inflows in 2024 were 30.0% higher to total NZ$47.7bn despite declining 4.5% in the December quarter,” the PFL report says. “Market leader ASB (44.6%) along with also Milford (66.1%) and Simplicity (52.7%) reported some significant percentage jumps in their annual Inflows but those of ANZ (-15.6%) were lower.”
In a departure from previous years, however, the non-KiwiSaver retail funds saw the strongest respective annual and quarterly growth of 26.2 per cent and 7.9 per cent in the PFL survey: KiwiSaver funds increased by 18.2 per cent over calendar year 2024 and 3.7 per cent in the December quarter.
KiwiSaver remains king, though, with about $142.2 billion under management as at the end of last year compared to $80.2 billion in the unlocked retail funds market.