Institutional Scribe, Jenny Ruth

• AMP’s Greg Camm
• AON’s Jim Routledge
• ING’s Marc Lieberman
• Institutional Scribe, Jenny Ruth
• Five Life Insurer CEO’s

OUR COMMENTS ON RUTH

This is an odd one because Ruth writes under the non-de-plume “Chalkie” in The Independent. Not declared by her however in her “hatchet job” on our public interest campaign, is that a primary source of her personal income is from writing for savings industry-funded trade magazines. Her article on us appeared in an issue full of KiwiSaver provider advertisements. So much for “independence” and transparency!

It was clear from the opening of our telephone conversation that Ruth was after an aggressive story, truly in the style of her self-appointed “Chalkie” sleuth. It was pathetic really as looming deadlines soon indicated she wouldn’t have too much time to get at the truth – not that this was a barrier to her agenda anyway.

So what do you do? Either tell her to bugger off, or try your best by answering with facts, and trust her objectivity.

• Jenny didn’t like that fact there were no pictures and we didn’t talk up the investment opportunity in our Investment Statement. What can we say?
• She didn’t like the nascence of investment performance – well that‘s obvious because KiwiSaver has just begun, all providers are in the same boat. I referred her to the garethmorgan.com site for that data but she was too lazy to look beyond the growth performance and then claimed we didn’t have data for balanced and conservative. Wrong.
• Jenny thought our investment team of six was too small. The investment team for the $9 bn Cullen fund is five!
• She queried our fees comparator without justification (no matter that it’s been independently audited) and because our charges are often the lowest concluded it must be wrong. If she just hadn’t been so lazy and read the comparator she would have discovered that a big element of the difference is that other providers add on declared but unquantified expenses to their fees, we don’t. She didn’t even question ING on this and just quotes their headline fees. You’d think that having been alerted to the issue she’d bother to read their prospectus to confirm what we told her. Either she’s a hack or her hatchet job didn’t allow for facts to intrude.
• Finally Ruth says she see no problems with unitisation. Lazy, lazy, lazy – all she had to do was go the ASIC site in Australia for a taste.