IT’S GAME ON I

t’s game on with dealer groups now that Australian-based Finsure has announced its arrival in New Zealand.

Finsure isn’t a name known in this market, but it is a serious player in Australia.

The group has made a smart move employing Jenny Campbell as its head of operations in New Zealand.

Campbell set up Mortgage Supply, which is now part of Astute; ran the old NZ Mortgage Brokers Association (which became part of the Professional Advisers Association – which then went on to be one of the founding associations for Financial Advice NZ).

While Campbell has been out of the industry for a while she has still stayed in touch with happenings.

Adding to Finsure’s arrival we have The Adviser Platform, tap rolling out its mortgage adviser proposition to the market. TAP has primarily been focussed in the risk advisory space and brings a differentiated offering to advisers.

As we have noted before the space becomes more interesting with the government essentially being the major shareholder of Link Financial Group.

These three developments will put pressure on the existing groups to lift their games and make sure they are delivering value to members.

From an adviser’s perspective there are now a good range of options and some clearly differentiated value propositions.

This is going to be an interesting space to watch.

Talking about interesting spaces to watch, we can add in non-bank lenders.

It came as a surprise to many that Bluestone has scaled back its head count significantly in New Zealand, including making its head of sales, Sue Griffiths redundant.

We still haven’t got to the bottom of what is behind this move but it looks like Bluestone is going to be more focussed on its white label, Select Home Loan, product offered exclusively to NZ Financial Serviced Group.

We have seen some other redundancies in the non-bank space, plus the demise of Zip in New Zealand (except its buy now, pay later product).

All these changes show the market is quite dynamic at the moment and there is a lot for advisers to think about.

Here at TMM we have set the date for next year’s conference and will start rolling out news and information over the next couple of months.

The first announcements will be our keynote economics presenter and we are bringing an awesome speaker out from Australia to do a sales and marketing session.

You can put this date in your diary. February 20. The location will be the Novotel, Auckland Airport.

Philip Macalister Publisher

Design

Publisher Philip Macalister

Staff writers

Sally Lindsay, Kerry Meadows-Bonner, Jonathan Flaws

Contributors Paul Watkins, Kip Hanna, Naomi Ballantyne