ANZ refreshes its investment beliefs

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ANZ Investments, the biggest KiwiSaver provider, has had a rethink of its investment beliefs and made changes to how it manages funds.

Thursday, April 24th 2025, 6:00AM 1 Comment

by Jenny Ruth

ANZ Investments will be using a mix of active, quantitative and passive approaches to investment in the hopes of achieving better long-term performance.

Chief investment officer George Crosby says the firm has “bolstered our investment team and external partnerships,” and “have started making meaningful changes to portfolios to enhance their resilience to market conditions and deliver good outcomes to our investors over the long term.”

While ANZ is a large player in the New Zealand market, “we recognise there are global experts with specialised skills that can enhance our capabilities,” Crosby says.

Among the external partnerships now are PIMCO, which it says encompasses both passive and active styles, and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, to enhance ANZ’s risk management capabilities.

“Their advanced technology, global expertise and reach help us make more timely decisions, ensuring our investments are managed effectively and are better able to deliver long-term performance,” Crosby says.

“Collectively, the refreshed investment beliefs ensure we consider how each investment contributes to our overall objectives, rather than focusing on the individual performance of each asset class,” he says, adding that’s often called a total portfolio approach.

It’s way too soon to be able to judge how ANZ’s new approach will impact investment returns, but the investment house will have been relieved by its March quarter KiwiSaver returns compared with other managers.

That’s even though volatile global markets driven by US erratic tariff policies meant it was a rough quarter for most.

As Good Returns has reported previously, ANZ remains the largest KiwiSaver manager despite its poor recent track record.

But in the March quarter, ANZ’s growth and balanced KiwiSaver funds were the second-best performers for the quarter after spending long periods languishing at or near the bottom of the performance tables

Crosby says ANZ’s new approach means it can “capture different sources of return to help us respond to market changes and use active investment styles where we believe they will most contribute to better long-term performance.”

He describes the changes as “a refresh of the previous beliefs rather than a complete rethink.”

For example, ANZ has previously said that it believes long-term investors outperform short-term investors.

Its new statement of beliefs includes: “Thinking long-term gives us more choices in what we invest in, how we invest, and how we build our team. When we do this well, we build scale, which gives us even more choices for how we invest to deliver better long-term investor outcomes.”

Tags: ANZ

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