OnePath wins fund manager of the year
OnePath had a successful night at the Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year Awards last night, scooping the overall prize as well as winning the KiwiSaver award.
Friday, March 2nd 2012, 6:00AM 
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by Niko Kloeten
It beat AMP Capital Investors and Milford Asset Management for the Fund Manager of the Year prize, while Milford and Westpac were the other finalists in the KiwiSaver category.
Fisher Funds took home the prize for domestic equities, beating AMP and Milford, while Brook Walter Scott won the international equities category where OnePath and Elevation Capital were also nominated.
Tower BondPlus won the fixed interest category ahead of AMP and OnePath.
ANZ managing director, wealth John Body said that "performance matters" and this requires having good people and strong investment processes.
"We define performance as consistency - our aspiration is not to be number one in January and number 15 in September."
Body said one aspect OnePath has been focusing on is disclosure and making sure information is provided in a way that investors can easily understand.
"One of the things we're passionate about is let's make this really easy for our customers to understand. It should be like the Apple model where everything is so intuitive to use - why can't fund managers make things that easy?"
Speaking about the KiwiSaver award, Body said KiwiSaver has given OnePath a clearer customer focus.
"If you think about the traditional model of selling products through advisers and third parties, the adviser was your customer to an extent.
"It has really sharpened our focus on the customer service aspect of our business. The responsibility of managing the retirement savings for 500,000 New Zealanders is something you can never take lightly."
Morningstar head of research Chris Douglas said the awards are judged on a combination of quantitative analysis of performance over one, three and five years on a risk-adjusted basis, overlaid with Morningstar's own view of how well managers have done in terms of people and processes.
"We look to reward managers who haven't just done well last year - we don't want to acknowledge those who are just a flash in the pan and blow themselves up."
Douglas said entrants in the KiwiSaver category are also judged on transparency, disclosure and investor experience.
Niko Kloeten can be contacted at niko@goodreturns.co.nz
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Please also let me know how much was repaid to investors in finance company settlements, Feltex settlements, Super Alpha Fund settlements or Credit Sails settlements?
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ANZ/OnePath might be “passionate” about a lot of things, but providing information in any form at all is not one of them.
ANZ’s total lack of judgment led it into a partnership with a bumbling partner (ING) which paid way over the odds for junk CDO tranches because its expertise did not run to discovering that bond prices were being held artificially float by underwriters trading among themselves.
ANZ instructed its sales staff (known as “advisers”) to pretend they knew what was going on and to sell risk-averse savers two funds (the DYF and the RIF) where a 10 per cent default rate (look at subordination and leverage) was enough to wipe out invested capital, and tell them that those funds were akin to term deposits.
It takes a brazen type of effrontery to keep denying—as ING and ANZ did—that the risk-averse savers were lured in by pied piper promises; that sales prospectuses were fiction; that the joint venture shut its eyes to risk, bought CDOs without knowing the contents, shoveled money into tranches constructed to fail, bought insanely risky junk bonds; bought vastly overpriced, leveraged tranches, that the levels of leverage were not checked; that the assets were not managed; that wealthier clients were warned to get their money out while the rest were left to sink, that deception was used to stop people pulling out their money when the crisis broke—and that the entire scheme was designed to pass on all risk to the retail client.
This was the moral level of the back-alley huckster.
Nothing has changed. That sense of entitlement remains undiminished. This can be seen from the froth of the Orwellian banking lexicon—as in “protecting” investors (used by Lieberman, Troup, and “independent” ING agents, under instructions, up and down the country as the funds were locked into a relentless nose dive.) “Protecting” meant nothing but “exposing them to all risk”.
Now readers are expected to believe that “The responsibility of managing the retirement savings for 500,000 New Zealanders is something you can never take lightly,” actually means something.
The sad part is: many of them will believe it.