What’s $12 million?
Enough to cement the Milford Asset Management KiwiSaver as the only top-12 scheme to make it into the black during a rugged March quarter, according to the latest Plan for Life (PFL) sector survey.
Milford ended the March quarter on just over $4.8 billion or a tiny 0.2 per cent ahead of its end-of-December KiwiSaver number, the PFL report shows.
But all other named schemes in the survey saw funds under management fall, ranging from between -1.1 per cent (Booster) and the -10.3 per cent recorded by Mercer – the latter one of five providers depleted by government-mandated default fund outflows.
While Mercer had the worst of the quarter proportionally, ANZ shed over $760 million during period where default transfers compounded market losses for the country’s largest KiwiSaver provider.
Both Fisher Funds and AMP recorded quarterly declines of 5.1 per cent while ASB was down 3.6 per cent: all three are ex-default schemes.
Even the influx of extra default money, however, failed to lift BNZ and Kiwi Wealth with the two providers falling about 3.5 per cent over the three-month period.
Super-charged default inflows also proved insufficient to lift Booster or Simplicity into positive territory with the schemes down a respective $40 million and almost $60 million during the quarter.
The remaining new default provider, the NZX-owned SuperLife, does not feature in PFL named rankings but would contribute to the ‘others’ result where funds under management fell 2.4 per cent for the quarter compared to the total average KiwiSaver decline of 3.6 per cent.
About 20 providers fill the ‘others’ bucket that spilled above $6.6 billion as at March 31 compared to almost $6.8 billion three months previously.
Overall net funds flows into KiwiSaver over the quarter reached $1.4 billion, the PFL survey shows, as investment losses and transfers out subtracted $4.7 billion.
The KiwiSaver market totaled $89.2 billion at quarter-end against more than $92.5 billion on December 31 last year.
Rael Solomon heads the Melbourne-based PFL, which is part of the Institutional Shareholder Services global group.