InvestmentLink is calling on people power to help it achieve the necessary critical mass to make the system work.
It is helping advisers form a lobby group to put pressure on fund managers to download data into the InvestmentLink system for advisers to use.
The underlying message advisers are giving fund managers is; if you don't use InvestmentLink we won't use your products.
Currently Armstrong Jones, BT, Equitable, Macquarie, National Bank Financial Services and Royal & SunAlliance are downloading data, Tower Trust Services, Trustees Executors, Bank of New Zealand and WestpacTrust are due to begin providing data in the next few months.
The missing links in the system are the life offices and a couple of major fund management firms such as Guardian Trust and New Zealand Funds Management.
InvestmentLink is currently investigating setting up a parallel system, called InsuranceLink, which would bring the life offices into the system and allow them to download data on both investment and risk products.
InvestmentLink executive director Frank Habrle says the weakness of the system at present is the number of fund managers actually downloading or intending to download data into the system is limited to about two thirds of the market.
Habrle describes it as a chicken and egg issue. The fund managers are slow to connect because there are perceived to be an insufficient number of advisers using the system, and advisers are slow to connect because there are insufficient managers and registries connected.
The idea to form a lobby group came from a series of user forums InvestmentLink recently ran.
Habrle told advisers at its mini-conference in Christchurch on Monday, that they should continue to tell fund managers what they want to run their business.
InvestmentLink is calling on people power to help it achieve the necessary critical mass to make the system work.