News Round Up

Westpac's Wrap reaches half bill, Another asset favoured, Comment and reaction on discussion document, New scam warning, Tower hit by storms and riots.

Monday, July 17th 2006, 6:44AM

Westpac says that its combined administration and investment service, Westpac Wrap, has reached $500 million. This is five times the balance and nearly four times the customer numbers the Westpac Wrap launched with in October 2004.

A key ingredient of the Wrap is The Westpac Premium Service, providing consolidated reporting so that customers can see their investments combined as one portfolio. The Premium Service offers a number of model portfolios.

The bank says Westpac is now one of the top two administrators of investment portfolios in New Zealand on the ASB-Bank owned Aegis platform.

The Westpac Wealth management offering is available to people with a balance of at least $50,000 and includes a wide range of services including the Wrap portfolios, managed funds, superannuation, share and bond trading, new issues and structured investment products.

Residential property not the only favoured asset
For the first time ever another asset class has equalled residential property in the ASB Investor Confidence survey.

While residential rental property remains the highest ranked asset class, at 19%, it has been joined this quarter by bank accounts and term deposits.

"Given market dynamics it is not surprising that confidence in residential rental property and managed funds both dropped this quarter, while bank accounts and term deposits rose," ASB head of relationship banking and financial services James Mitchell says. "This change is in line with the decelerating housing market and weaker equity performance, and high deposit rates for savings products.”

“In general, people are still relatively optimistic about their investment returns," he says.

New scam warning
The Securities Commission is warning investors about a new version of unsolicited investment offers from overseas.

The scam uses faxes and e-mails to target people with offers of share deals. The investment offer is meant to get victims to send money before the “services” are delivered. To prove their authenticity these “brokers” often refer people to fake regulators’ websites.

These websites use .gov.us in their addresses. All United States federal websites have websites addresses ending with .gov. A website ending with .gov.us is likely to be a fake agency.

Comment - and reaction on discussion document The MED discussion document on adviser regulation is a useful start, but a little frustrating.

Why? Well it seems many people wanted a roadmap which they could discuss – rather they have a zillion questions to answer.

The challenge is to isolate the direction this thing is going and decide how different it is from the task force recommendations. [Read on...]

Tower hit by storm and riot claims
Financial services company Tower said it faced recent insurance claims of over $5 million from local storms and Solomon Island riots, but these were in line with its forecasts [more]

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