Weekly Wrap: ING the currency of the week

If there was a common currency in this week’s news, it was ING. The company featured in a lot of stories, however the week didn’t end with an ING.

Saturday, February 28th 2009, 11:44AM

Clearly the big news was that the company has dumped its original proposal around the DYF and RIF funds and come up with something far more palatable for investors and advisers.

ING also featured in the news this week as Medical Assurance dumped it as its manager.

This is an important story as it seems like they are the first KiwiSaver manager to be replaced (email corrections to here if we are wrong) and secondly the Medical funds were a significant amount of fee income for the manager.

The other story where the company appeared was our exclusive about a new dealer group being set up.

One of the things which we are hearing in the market is that many competing firms are thinking that advisers aligned to ING are a good target to chase at the moment as they may well be disaffected and unhappy. This new group was quite clear that they were looking to ING-aligned advisers.

This story will become more interesting as it appears some of the people involved with the group have strong ties to ING.

What else was news this week? Well we ended up by running a market-related story from TOWER, where its investment managers are suggesting that the market has not yet bottomed out.

If there is any good news in the market it is that reporting season for NZX-listed companies doesn’t seem to have been too bad.

The other big news this morning is that New Zealand’s biggest broking network, ABN Amro Craigs is returning to local ownership. As we report here, Royal Bank of Scotland is selling its 50% stake in the firm to Craigs staff.

Advisers and loyalty
There are so many things going on in the industry at the moment it is hard to know which one to comment on. ING would be the prime candidate, but I will leave that for another 24 hours or so. [more]

While the above Blog is about finance companies, we have a new section in Depositrates.co.nz. Each Monday we will have Rates Round Up which provides you with a summary of all the news relating to rates, TD, finance companies and other investment options during the week. You can see this week’s version here.

During the week we had a couple of announcements and one of those was from Strategic Finance. Details are here. Marac has reported today too and its results are here.

The latest life insurance sales statistics from the ISI are out and they are again good news for the industry.

In the overseas media we have seen AIG back in the headlines and as we report in Insurance News this will mean some changes for the group’s business in the Asia Pacific region.

While it means changes, it’s impressive to see that AIG Life is getting on with business in New Zealand, rolling out its Distinction programme and developing product.

Our practice management piece asks: Why do some advisers seem to gain new clients effortlessly while others struggle to find ways to turn prospects into clients? And the answer is here!

Next week will be a busy one as we have the Professional Advisers Association conference in Rotorua. Good Returns will be covering the event and also its insurance adviser of the year awards on Thursday night.

If you are interested in the conference click here.

Have a great weekend.

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