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Veteran ANZ Investments head of Australasian fixed income, Iain Cox, has left the business after a 15-year career with the bank-owned fund manager. Cox also spent almost five years until 2011 in the ANZ fund predecessor business, the OnePath joint venture with ING that the bank ultimately bought outright. He was one of the few remaining long-serving members of the ANZ team that has seen the departure of at least half a dozen senior investment staff in recent years including Craig Tyson, Maaike van Tol, Alan Clarke, Craig Brown and Mat Young – the latter leaving this September. In the interim, Varun Khanna, has assumed the role of ANZ acting head of fixed income. Khanna came to ANZ in 2022 as a fixed interest portfolio manager following almost five years as a senior manager at Jarden. Previously, he spent a year in a senior analyst role for BNZ after a two-year system analyst stint at ASB. And ANZ has also updated its investment strategy with a newly stated ‘total portfolio approach’ style for its multi-asset funds. George Crosby, ANZ chief investment officer, said in practice the asset management style – pioneered at his old shop, the NZ Superannuation Fund – “means we are not ‘set and forget’”. “Every investment strategy competes for capital, rather than being siloed into individual benchmark allocations. We continuously assess the relative attractiveness of all strategies,” Crosby said. “For example, a decision to actively implement a credit mandate is evaluated alongside other strategies, such as active listed equities, with risk allocation sized according to each strategy’s contribution to the portfolio’s overall risk-adjusted return.” The latest investment strategy revision follows a rewrite this February that emphasised ‘flexibility’ over rigid adherence to active management. “The refreshed beliefs mean we actively choose how to implement our investments – we can choose active, systematic or passive strategies – but this is about flexibility,” Crosby said at the time. “We remain active investors.” ANZ hired BlackRock last year to provide a range of advisory and implementation services as well as a couple of underlying investment mandates. With about $35 billion under management in total, ANZ remains one of the largest investment firms in the country but it has been losing retail market share over the last few years – as per the latest Plan for Life survey. As at the end of September last year, ANZ reported $33.5 billion of asset including $21.7 billion of KiwiSaver money held across its three schemes. The 2024 ANZ investment annual report counts a further $7.4 billion in non-KiwiSaver funds and almost $4.4 billion of ‘other investment portfolios’: the group also held $2 billion of assets under administration via its external adviser-directed OneAnswer platform. ANZ shuttered its wholesale investment business last year, leaving rivals to scoop up about $3.5 billion of largely fixed income assets. During the 12 months to September 30, 2024, the ANZ investment arm pulled in a total $210 million plus in revenue with KiwiSaver accounting for almost $160 million, other funds (circa $40 million), $10 million from other portfolios and $1.2 million from the OneAnswer platform. The ANZ investments holding company saw a director exchange at the end of last month with Genevieve Beech and Annis O’Brien replacing Amanda Owen and Keren Roberts on the three-person board featuring ANZ funds managing director, Fiona Mackenzie, as well. O’Brien and Mackenzie are also on the ANZ investments operating company board along with five others including former Kiwi Wealth chief, Ian Burns.
