Seven thousand waitlisted for Sharesies KiwiSaver
One day after Sharesies announced its entrance into the KiwiSaver market early next year, 7000 people have joined its waitlist, the bulk of them existing members of the online investment platform.
Friday, December 9th 2022, 8:30AM
by Andrea Malcolm
Sharesies has a team of 15 to 20 people working on the main build of its KiwiSaver scheme which will include funds focused on active growth, indexed funds and ethical funds alongside conservative, balanced and growth. Pathfinder, SuperLife and Pie Funds are locked in as providers and there are ongoing talks with other fund managers.
Sharesies KiwiSaver members will be able to spread their investments across multiple funds, says Sharesies co-founder and joint CEO Leighton Roberts.
“We've worked really hard on our brand to connect with people and support them in good decision making. We’ve got an audience now that we think is engaged, all right level.”
About 65% of Sharesies customers are under the age of 40 and skewing older over time and Leighton says they’re finding more of their customers are coming to the platform through financial advisers.
“Sharesies research has found that many customers feel locked out of advice due to lack of confidence or the expense. We want people to have good outcomes and advice is part of that. We’d like to work with advisors because we now have the reach to an audience that is really engaged and interested.”
Kantar research done for Sharesies last month found that the platform's users were more likely to switch KiwiSaver providers in the past at 54% to get better returns and lower fees, compared to 40% of the general public. Its users were also more likely to make larger contributions to KiwiSaver with almost half saying they contribute more than the minimum 3%. More than half of Sharesies investors also believed they would need more than a million dollars to fund their retirement compared to 39% of New Zealanders in general.
“We've been doing that research for the last three or four years, and people are really building confidence. Things like switching comes from confidence, things like putting more than your minimum contribution, again, comes from feeling confident about what you're going to be doing and what you're going to get out of it.”
But Roberts says Sharesies does not encourage or drive switching behaviour. “Our ethos has always been small amounts over a long period of time, which sums up KiwiSaver perfectly. All that being said, you know, it is diligent for people to look at who their providers are at any time and make sure that it still suits their needs.”
Given the younger demographic, ethical investment is likely to be popular with Sharesies members but there’s a lot of confusion about what constitutes ethical.
“I think we can all agree that ‘responsible’ has become a bit of a tagline. Early research showed us that responsible was such a hard word to engage someone with because responsible to me and responsible to you are quite different. In our founding group, the six of us, none of us could agree what it means.
“We'd like to talk more about supporting people to invest in line with their values. So we will be making it clear, transparent and upfront about what people’s money will be going into and that way people can make a good decision on that. All that said, one of the funds we've got on is the Pathfinder Fund, which has won the sustainable response investing award in New Zealand for the last couple of years”
Currently the Shares investment platform is used by more than 10% of New Zealanders with $2 billion funds under management.
| « Sharesies launches Kiwisaver scheme | Big KiwiSaver providers go for digital tools for advice » |
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