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Market Structure

NZ Financial Advice Provider channel concentration

521 Financial Advice Providers currently employ 1,000 registered financial advisers in New Zealand. The top 10 FAPs account for 27.7% of adviser headcount; the top 30 account for 39.1%.

Data current as of 2026-05-29. Sources: FSPR · FAP↔adviser linkage via fap_adviser_links.

Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI)

134

HHI of 134 on adviser-headcount basis. For reference, the US Department of Justice / FTC classifies markets as: · Unconcentrated: HHI < 1,500
· Moderately concentrated: HHI 1,500 – 2,500
· Highly concentrated: HHI > 2,500

Note: HHI is a US/EU competition-policy heuristic, not a NZ Commerce Commission standard. Treat as descriptive context only.

Top 30 NZ FAPs by adviser headcount

Includes overseas-registered and consumer-non-facing entities (filter not applied here so the channel-structure view is complete).

Top 20 product providers by NZ FAP distribution

Most-distributed product providers across the ~52 FAP Public Disclosure Statements FA-NZ has on file.

What this page is for

Concentration metrics like the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and top-N share are descriptive tools for understanding market structure. This page reports them for the NZ Financial Advice Provider channel — the firms appointing the ~1,000 registered advisers consumers actually engage with — as a public-interest information surface.

FAP concentration matters for consumers and policymakers for several reasons: (a) higher concentration tends to mean fewer effective panel choices for advisers and therefore fewer effective product choices for clients, (b) regulatory enforcement workload tends to scale with the long tail of small FAPs rather than the top-of-list, (c) entry barriers for new FAPs are partly shaped by the share of advisers already locked into the largest groups.

Methodology

  • Adviser-headcount basis: we count distinct advisers each FAP is the appointing FAP for via fap_adviser_links. An adviser appointed to multiple FAPs is counted once per FAP.
  • HHI calculation: sum of squared market-share percentages × 10,000. Standard antitrust-style heuristic. Higher = more concentrated.
  • Product-provider distribution: extracted from each FAP's Public Disclosure Statement (FMC Act 2013 s431). Coverage is currently ~52 of ~521 FAPs (10%); top-provider rankings are directionally correct but absolute FAP counts will grow as more PDSes are ingested.
  • Currency: recalculated on every page load from public.network_edges_mv + home_services.fap_adviser_links. Cached at the CDN for 24 hours.

What we are NOT measuring

  • AUM (assets under management) — not available from public registers
  • Revenue or commission flow — disclosure-level only, not transaction-level
  • Quality, performance, or suitability — concentration is structural, not qualitative
  • Cross-shareholding or beneficial ownership across FAPs — separate analysis, planned for a future page

For B2B data buyers, journalists, and researchers: Time-series of concentration changes, FAP-by-FAP adviser-flow tracking, cross-shareholding analyses, and bespoke market-structure reports are available as paid surfaces. Contact hello@financeadvisers.co.nz.

FinanceAdvisersNZ is a directory mirror of public NZ register and FAP disclosure data. We are not a Financial Advice Provider, do not provide regulated financial advice, and do not vet, verify, or endorse advisers.