KiwiSaver: The journey begins

Wednesday, March 14th 2007, 10:01PM

The start of the KiwiSaver scheme is just months away and you can feel this beast, or should I say bird, slowly starting to prepare to rise up.

A discussion we had at our Monday morning staff meeting showed me that the awareness of KiwiSaver's birth is starting to rise beyond just the people in the industry.

For something different I thought I would write an occassional series of Blogs on what KiwiSaver means from the perspective of a SME business owner.

Hopefully it will help people in the industry and other business owners deal with the issue, and maybe even promote some discussion.

The catalyst was when one of our staff asked what we, as an employer, were going to do about KiwiSaver.

It would be fair to say, and possibly maybe a surpise to many because of our place in the savings industry, that as employers we had done very little!

We have always had a desire to establish a company superannuation scheme in the past, but enquiries to various people in the industry hadn't got us very far and it all fe l l into the too-hard basket.

I have always found it interesting that the workplace super providers have done little for SMEs in the past. No doubt there are economic reasons for this, or maybe other reasons. Any ideas from people in this space would be interesting.

I ask this question as I wonder if this trend will flow through to KiwiSaver.

No one has made much attempt to strike up a conversation with us so far. There has been one letter from our bank which said KiwiSaver is coming, and that they will offer a product. I thought it was a bit of a light attempt to strike up some dialogue on the issue really.

We will see (and I'll report) on how this develops and what else transpires. Maybe other providers will start reading this series of Blogs and all be knocking down our door, or perhaps they will be too scared to contact us as they may ger criticised! Heaven forbid.

If you would like to comment on KiwiSaver email me at blog@goodreturns.co.nz

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