Tauranga-based Craigs Investment Partners has agreed to buy the investment advisory business of Hamilton Hindin Greene, the Christchurch wealth management firm that has just turned 125 years old. The deal lifts Craigs to more than 210 advisers nationally and pushes its funds under management past 35 billion dollars, cementing a buying spree that has now stretched across three regions in less than a year.
Hamilton Hindin Greene was founded in Christchurch in 1900 and has spent every year since helping South Island households and small businesses invest in the New Zealand and Australian sharemarkets. Until this week the firm was 100 percent staff owned and operated from Level 1 of 83 Victoria Street in central Christchurch, offering investment advice, managed portfolios, sharebroking, KiwiSaver and UK pension transfers. Under the unconditional agreement, all of those services will move across to Craigs and the combined Christchurch and Rangiora teams will expand from 20 advisers to 28.
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
Craigs chief executive Simon Tong told RNZ Business that growing the firm’s presence in Christchurch was timely given the strength of the local economy. “The agreement with Hamilton Hindin Greene aligns strongly with Craigs’ growth strategy and strengthens our position as an independent, nation-wide leader in personalised wealth management,” Tong said.
Canterbury has been one of the fastest growing regions in the country through the post-Covid years, helped by a population that has been swelled by Aucklanders moving south, a rebuilt central city and a strong run for the rural economy. Local sharebrokers say that growth has pushed demand for advice well beyond what existing teams can handle, particularly from clients who are inheriting Christchurch family money or selling farms and looking for a place to park the proceeds.
The Hamilton Hindin Greene purchase is the third regional deal Craigs has signed in under a year. Last year the firm bought Hawke’s Bay sharebroker Somerset Smith Partners, giving it a much larger team in Napier and Hastings. Last month it announced the acquisition of Dunedin financial planning and wealth management firm Phwealth, beefing up its Otago presence. The Christchurch deal now plugs the obvious South Island gap between those two anchor offices.
Craigs itself was founded as Craig and Co by Neil Craig in Whakatane in 1984 and has spent four decades quietly building out from a Bay of Plenty base. The firm now operates from more than 20 locations between Kerikeri and Invercargill, serves about 70,000 clients and is held 50 percent by current and former staff and directors, with the other 50 percent owned by US private equity firm TA Associates. The TA stake replaced the 50 percent that Australian investment bank Wilsons used to hold, after Craigs bought that block back in 2025. Craigs also runs a longstanding research and product partnership with Raymond James in the United States and a strategic partnership with JP Morgan Asset Management.
For Hamilton Hindin Greene clients, the most visible change will be access to the much wider model portfolios, structured products and managed funds menu that Craigs’ research team runs out of Tauranga, including new institutional offerings that flow from the JP Morgan deal. UK pension transfer work, which has been a steady niche for the Christchurch firm, will continue.
The deal is a quiet milestone for the New Zealand sharebroking industry. Twenty years ago the country had a long tail of small, family-owned, partner-run brokers, most of them with deep local franchises in a single town. That model has been steadily collapsing into a handful of national firms. Forsyth Barr, Jarden and Craigs now dominate the retail end, while institutional flow has consolidated around the same three names plus a few global investment banks. Hamilton Hindin Greene was one of the last sizeable independents still operating south of the Bombay Hills.
Jarden is heading the other way at the moment. As Newswire reported earlier this week, the firm is planning to break up the 44 billion dollar FirstCape wealth management business it co-owns with BNZ and Pacific Equity Partners, and refocus its own investment banking arm as a staff-owned operation. The contrast with Craigs is striking. Where Jarden is shrinking its retail wealth footprint, Craigs is buying every reputable regional book it can find.
The market backdrop for both strategies is the same. New Zealand has roughly 110 billion dollars of household money sitting in KiwiSaver, another 80 billion or so in direct shares and managed funds outside KiwiSaver, and a rapidly ageing population. The Reserve Bank’s latest household financial assets data show that share of wealth held outside housing has been creeping up every quarter since 2022, as house price growth has slowed and term deposit rates have come off their peaks. Whoever owns the adviser relationship at the moment baby boomers retire and decumulate is in a very valuable position. Craigs is betting that scale and a national footprint will win that contest. Hamilton Hindin Greene’s staff shareholders, after 125 years, have decided to take the cheque.
For Christchurch, the deal means that the city’s oldest sharebroker name is about to disappear from the front of the Victoria Street office, even if most of the same faces will still be inside. Whether that is progress or another small loss of local character depends entirely on which side of the counter you sit on.
What do you think — is the consolidation of New Zealand sharebroking into three big national firms good for investors, or do we lose something when 125 year old local names get folded into head office? Drop a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply