[Weekly Wrap] What do you offer clients?

In the final Weekly Wrap of the year we look at the question: What is your unique selling point to clients? Or, put another way; What do you offer clients? It's a good question you could answer now or contemplate over the holidays. But first of all we look at exchange traded funds.

Friday, December 19th 2014, 3:00PM

Being the end of the year and all that there's a lot of looking back over the past 12 months. Today I'm going to avoid that (well try anyway). Rather some of the news recently makes me think about trends for next year.

We have had quite a lot of news about passive funds and ETFs in the past couple of weeks. Amongst the stories NZX has rolled out more funds; its subsidiary SmartShares has essentially acquired the SuperLife KiwiSaver and superannuation business and Harbour Asset Management has launched a fund which brings active and passive strategies together.

The Harbour fund has attracted a bit of attention. Overall it's good to see new and different product coming to the market.

ETFs or Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) are pretty big overseas, however it is unclear how much traction they have in New Zealand. Part of the difficulty is that many people use managers like Vanguard which fly below the radar in this country.

NZX chief executive Tim Bennett is pretty keen to change that and has plans to launch quite a few ETPs over the next year. His view is that NZX has the size and economies of scale to do this successfully in New Zealand.

Another story which was interesting this week - and was surprising it didn't get a lot of comment - was about what do advisers really offer their clients? FMA chief executive Rob Everett raised the question in a speech earlier this year.

While the headline of the story was Why should consumers use advice, the story was asking advisers this question: What do you offer your customers? What is your USP?

It would be interesting to hear from advisers about this.

One adviser who didn't have a great USP was Nelson-based Tony Mount. This week he was sent to the slammer after being convicted of fraud. Here's what he is having for Christmas.

This is the final Weekly Wrap of the year. However Good Returns will continue to be updated throughout the holidays.

PS: If you own investment property (or have clients who do) can you take a moment to complete our annual survey. There is a little incentive for doing it too!

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