FMA: Lack of financial advice for small investors concerning

New Zealand’s investment watchdog wants quicker access to robo-advice to be made a priority over concerns that financial advice is only being given to the rich.

Latest figures released by the Financial Markets Authority, show most people who get specialist financial advice have between $200,000 and $500,000 in investable assets — and the average amount is rising.

There are 1800 authorised financial advisers in New Zealand — a number consistent with last year — but the number giving advice at the lower end of the market has dropped.

Last year just 20 per cent advised people with assets of between $1m and $5m compared to 28.5 per cent in 2014.

Instead there has been growth in the number giving advice to people with more than $50 million in assets.

Last year, 26.8 per cent gave advice to people with assets of more than $50 million compared to 18.4 per cent in 2014.

“What we are concerned about is the number of people who aren’t getting advice in New Zealand,” said Liam Mason, director of regulation at the FMA.

The report only looks at a small part of the adviser industry — a further 20,000 advisers are thought to be employed via banks and other financial service providers like KiwiSaver providers.

While another 6000 are registered financial advisers who currently don’t have to meet any minimum qualifications to give financial advice on certain products.

Mason said it could not give a view on what those advisers were doing because it did not collect the same data from them.

But research released last year on KiwiSaver — which the FMA sees as the main point of contact for investment advice in New Zealand — found just three in 1000 people are getting personalised advice when it comes to KiwiSaver.

Mason said he believed the key to getting more people access to advice was around KiwiSaver.

More than 2.7 million Kiwis are now signed up for the retirement savings scheme which has close to $40 billion invested in it.

The FMA recently published guidance on giving advice around KiwiSaver which it hopes will encourage more of the industry to give advice to savers following criticism that previous guidance had encouraged advisers to give no advice for fear of breaching the law.

But he said at the moment unless people had KiwiSaver as part of a larger portfolio of investments many people were unlikely to be seeking advice or able to get it.

And even those with larger amounts of money to invest may not be getting broad KiwiSaver advice.

The AFA report shows 66 per cent gave KiwiSaver advice but more than half (52 per cent) gave advice on just one KiwiSaver scheme.

Mason said because of increased regulatory requirements the costs associated with giving advice to people with small amounts of savings did not stack up.

“The economics just don’t make sense for small balances.”

Instead it is hoping robo-advice — or digital advice based on mathematical algorithms — will help fill the gap.

Robo-advice will be made legal in New Zealand through a revamp of the Financial Advisers Act which is expected to be passed in law this year and then come into force by 2019.

But Mason said the bill was looking at the ability to enable robo-advice through the existing regime.

Mason said the risks of people not getting financial advice were that people don’t move out of the default KiwiSaver funds or stayed in a fund that was not suitable for their age and stage in life which could mean they missed out on opportunities to increase their retirement savings or took on too much risk.

They could also end up being charged higher fees without advice on how to shop around and compare funds.

“We are trying to bridge the gap between no advice at all and people getting some help with their decisions.”