BNZ, Kiwi Wealth and Milford Asset Management signed off on a year of stellar retail fund growth with more chart-topping efforts in the final quarter of 2017, according to new data from Australian researcher, Strategic Insight (SI).
The trio of managers all grew well above average over the December 2017 quarter led by Milford, which boosted funds under management (FUM) to more than $4.8 billion as at year-end (up 11.3 per cent for the three-month period).
However, BNZ scored the highest annual growth rate of almost 47 per cent (8.8 per cent for the quarter) compared to Milford (28.6 per cent) and Kiwi Wealth (27.9 per cent).
All three managers upped their respective market shares by between 0.4-0.5 per cent during the 12-month period but were outgunned by ASB, which took its share of the NZ retail market from 13.6 per cent as at the end of 2016 to 14.6 per cent a year later.
ASB, the country’s second-largest retail manager, reported FUM growth of 24.2 per cent over 2017 (5.2 per cent for the quarter) compared to market-leading ANZ’s respective annual and quarterly figures of 13.8 per cent and 4.3 per cent.
ANZ saw market share decline from 28.8 per cent to 28.2 per cent in 2017 with FUM of just over $26 billion now slightly less than double its nearest rival, ASB (almost $13.5 billion).
Fisher Funds and Booster also increased market share a little during the year as Westpac/BT held steady at 12.2 per cent. Mercer gave up 0.2 per cent market share in 2017 to finish with 6.2 per cent ($5.7 billion). Meanwhile, AMP closed out the year with 12.5 per cent of the NZ retail FUM market, down 1 per cent for the 12-month period, the SI figures show.
Managers outside the top 10 also struggled to grow in 2017 seeing their collective market share slide to 7.7 per cent at year-end compared to 8.5 per cent 12 months previously.
Nonetheless, minority players staged something of a comeback in the December quarter with a combined growth rate of 4.9 per cent – bang on the overall average: for the year this group was up 5 per cent compared to the industry average of 15.9 per cent.
“New Zealand Retail Managed Funds were up strongly by 4.9% during the December 2017 quarter to total NZ$92.2bn,” the SI report says. “Over the whole of the past year they climbed yet another 15.9% which was in line with the average growth rate experienced over the previous 4 years.”
The NZ retail market was awash with gross inflows of almost $24 billion in 2017 – an increase of 10.1 per cent “building further on the very strong 22% plus average recorded over the previous five years”, the SI survey says.
“There was the usual dip in reported Inflows growth during the December quarter which saw them decline 3.2% due to KiwiSaver seasonality factors,” the report says. “Year on year BNZ, ASB, BT / Westpac, Kiwi Wealth, Generate, Milford, AMP and Fisher all posted above average Inflow growth rates while on the other hand those of market leader ANZ were lower.”