National financial advisory network, Wealthpoint, has picked up the prestigious ‘Emerging Business of the Year’ prize at the NZ co-operative industry body awards last week.
According to a release, the Co-operative Business NZ award judges cited “both the breadth and complexity” of the Wealthpoint member services, which have expanded in recent years.
Wealthpoint emerged out the AMP-affiliated adviser association in 2019 to house about 55 firms under a co-op structure: the group has 155 advisers operating under its financial advice provider licence.
Since striking out from the AMP fold, Wealthpoint has built a diversified financial services offering that spans insurance (life as well as health and general), mortgage and investment advice.
Wealthpoint, which has over $4 billion in funds under management, hired consultancy firm Makao Investments in 2020 to build model portfolios and provide asset allocation advice.
Mark Nalder, Wealthpoint head of strategy and growth, said the group had “moved beyond a setup phase” over the last 18 months, attracting about 60 new advisers since the beginning of last year.
Close to half of the new Wealthpoint advisers are female while the average age of all recent recruits is in the “the mid-high 30s”, the release says – statistics that belie broader industry trends.
“Few entities appear to be making meaningful investments to growing the industry’s adviser force to counter the adviser exits seen over the past few years,” Nalder said.
He said the co-op structure had been instrumental in creating a “competitive advantage” for the group.
“We prioritise delivery of services that help members to be successful,” Some of these services might not offer the immediate payback that would perhaps be demanded if we had external shareholders”, says Nalder.
Wealthpoint fended off NZ Cleaning Coop and photo library operation, TrueStock, to take out the emerging business gong.
Cooperative Business NZ chief, Roz Henry, said the “nominations we received this year were exceptional”.
“They reflected the vast spread of sectors and sizes of New Zealand’s co-operatives and mutuals,” Henry said.
Co-ops and mutuals generate about 18 per cent of NZ annual GDP revenue, the industry body says.
ANZ also secured third-party endorsement last week after winning the top Reader’s Digest ‘Quality Service Award’ in the KiwiSaver category.
Fisher Funds earned a silver for second in the Reader’s Digest annual popularity contest that was based on a survey of 1,620 New Zealanders carried out by Catalyst Consultancy & Research.
Reader’s Digest editor-in-chief, Louise Waterson, said in a statement: “For the award-winning businesses this means successfully delivering assistance in an innovative and savvy manner, while at the same time remaining approachable simply by upholding levels of kindness and understanding as central to assisting individual customers properly.”