Trustees Executors to sell registry business, focus on supervision

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Trustees Executors is trimming its business back to what it has decided is its “core business” of acting as a corporate trustee and provider of licensed supervision services.

Wednesday, February 26th 2025, 8:52AM 1 Comment

by Jenny Ruth

That means its registry services business is now up for sale.

This follows the sale in February last year of its private wealth business, which had $2.2 billion in assets under management, to Perpetual Guardian. That included the wills, estates and trust administration business.

Then in July last year, it sold its custody and investment accounting business to Apex Group.

Trustees Executors acts as supervisor of a range of corporate unit trusts, including the NZX-listed Vital Healthcare Property Trust, KiwiSaver schemes such as ASB’s, Booster’s and Generate’s, superannuation funds and group investment funds, including Fisher Funds.

It also supervises retirement villages, securitised debt instruments, and non-bank deposit takers, including finance companies, credit unions and building societies.

Trustees Executors chair Rob Russell said the company isn’t in any rush to complete its transition.

“We acknowledge the impact of this decision and are dedicated to managing the transition in a professional and transparent manner.”

The company says its decision is part of a long-term strategy “to increase the quality and value we provide to our clients by concentrating our resources and expertise on these core services.”

Russell said his company wants the transition to be “seamless” for its registry clients.

“Our primary focus remains on delivering high-quality corporate trustee and licensed supervision services for the long term,” he said.

“As a business, we see what is currently on offer to our clients in the market and feel we can add better value. This is where we will be focusing the business moving forward.”

Corporate trustees, including Trustees Executors, didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory during the wholesale collapse of many finance companies and were widely seen as failing to prevent the many dubious business practices that led to the collapses and sent a number of executives to jail.

Trustees Executors had been trustee of South Canterbury Finance which cost the government $1.6 billion to make good its depositors.

More recently, it came under scrutiny when Vital Healthcare’s manager, Toronto-listed NorthWest Healthcare Property Real Estate Investment Trust, started using Vital as a kind of piggy bank to aid its efforts to buy Australian healthcare properties – after concerted investor opposition, Vital didn’t participate in the Australian deal.

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