Kiwi Wealth is a NZ-owned investment management firm with over $9bn of funds under management for its KiwiSaver, Managed Funds and Private Portfolio customers.

Chief Technology Officer Craig Ward says the 15-year-old company’s principles of transparency have ensured that from the very beginning they’ve developed inhouse digital tools to give up-to-date reporting - down to the dollar - on its customers’ investments and more recently with the first NZ licence for robo advice. 

Over the past two years Kiwi Wealth’s main technology innovation programme has had three key pillars to modernise some of this legacy technology. These are Kiwi Wealth Data Hub, Registry and the Financial Intelligence Platform.

Kiwi Wealth Data Hub: Establishing a modern, cloud native data warehouse, API and integration layer to enable the business to store, consume and integrate data from multiple sources, particularly as innovators in the Open Banking/Open Finance space. This, says Ward, is a fundamental backend building block for innovation projects.

Registry: In financial services, a ‘registry’ is the core system that stores the holdings of a particular client into the funds they are invested in. It also provides other key services such as reporting, tax, accounting and switching. Kiwi Wealth’s 15-year-old inhouse registry had served its 250,000 customers well but was no longer fit-for-purpose.

Financial Intelligence Platform: Building on the previous innovations, the Financial Intelligence Platform allows the company to take its existing winning robo and digital advice tools and augment it with open banking data.

In December 2021, Kiwi Wealth implemented its new outsourced Registry system. 

“Registries in financial services are essentially the backbone of the investment management process, being the single source of truth for what holdings in a fund a customer holds along with pricing, tax and underlying securities,” says Ward.  “Kiwi Wealth’s registry had been developed inhouse over 15 years ago. What was once a strategic advantage had become a roadblock in our technology transformation. Having successfully won the mandate to be reappointed as one of six government appointed default providers the new registry needed to be implemented with a hard deadline of December to enable the new Default fund.”

As the executive sponsor of this innovation project, Ward was responsible for ensuring this mammoth task was delivered to a tight deadline. 

It was a highly complex project involving changing fund accounting, unit pricing and registry to a third-party outsource provider, changing pricing basis from weekly to daily, changing PIE reporting from quarterly to annual and on exit, accommodating IRD B2B upgrade from AS2 to APIs, all before the KiwiSaver default deadline.

This was all done in just six months, adds Ward.

Registry and Data Hub provided the next level of innovation for Kiwi Wealth customers, delivering the following key benefits and metrics:

• Retaining Default status and an additional $380m of new Funds Under Management (FUM) from transfer in from competitors who failed to retain default status
• Modernising our legacy tech stack by developing a cloud native solution, with Kiwi Wealth’s in-house team of developers. Utilising modern PaaS including Kiwi Wealth Data Hub built in Azure Data Factory.
• Net reduction of call centre FTE allowing them to move into customer success roles and digital advice.
• Ability to execute on new funds and propositions in much shorter time frames; moving to “funds as a service” as opposed to developing unique code for each fund in house. The ability to quickly standup new funds such as NZ Equities or tailored ESG or Green funds.
• Enabling better customer outcomes moving from weekly unit pricing to daily increasing the speed to pay withdrawals particularly for hardships and first-home withdrawals, which are often timely and complex.

“Our innovation was driven in part by a hard deadline but also our purpose: to enable Kiwis to have a brighter financial future,” says Ward. “We strongly believe that giving customers the best possible advice unique to their needs, supported by open banking/finance data that they already own can truly deliver the financial future they aspire to, whether that’s retirement or putting their children through university. Having strong data foundations, a core outsourced registry and a truly innovative digital customer experience is key to our success.”