14 LISTENER MAY 26 2018

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all centre staff at retirement

funds manager KiwiWealth

returned to work on Wednes-

day, February 7, to phone

lines that were running hot.

Much of the country had

taken a four-day weekend

including Waitangi Day. Yet

the mini-holiday fell in the middle of one

of the biggest convulsions in global financial

markets of the past decade. Suddenly, after

what has been a period of remarkable sta-

bility and growth since the global financial

crisis in September 2008, share-price indexes

were all over the place.

Historically low interest rates and money-

printing by the world’s most powerful

central banks since the crisis have fed an

almost ceaseless upward march in the value

of shares and property.

The February blip was a warning: this

won’t last forever. Between February 1 and 9,

about US$5 trillion ($7.2 trillion) was wiped

off the value of global financial markets.

“There was a real dip in the markets and

it was quite prominent on the news on

Waitangi Day,” says KiwiWealth’s general

manager of customers, products and inno-

vation, Joe Bishop. “When we came in on

that Wednesday, there was a spike in the

number of people looking to understand a

little bit more.”

New Zealanders generally don’t ask a lot

of questions about or make a lot of changes

to our KiwiSaver fund choices, says Massey

University business school’s Claire Mat-

thews, who studies the sector. We are a

population that is “apathetic” at best about

our involvement in KiwiSaver.

As an “active” KiwiSaver funds manager,

with about $3.5 billion invested on behalf of

about 185,000 New Zealanders, KiwiWealth

is one of the few providers with its own

investment team, who pick shares, bonds

and other investments across the globe.

Unlike KiwiSaver funds that rely on

lower cost “passive” investment strategies,

KiwiWealth charges more for its results and

spends more on serving individual custom-

ers. It expects those customer calls and

invests in online tools, videos and guides

both to meet and control the cost of such

demands.

Its fees are higher than those KiwiSaver

providers who offer more of a no-frills

approach to investment, putting their

REBEKAH ROBINSON members’ funds into some of the more than

INVESTMENT

We are a population

that is apathetic at best

about our involvement

in KiwiSaver.