Jarden, one of New Zealand’s largest home grown investment houses, is preparing a sweeping restructure that would split its wealth and asset management arm from its investment bank and hand control of the giant FirstCape platform to its Australian partners.
RNZ has reported that sources familiar with the plan say the wealth and asset management businesses now sitting inside FirstCape would be divested by Jarden, leaving the investment banking and broking unit to be retained in an employee owned structure. Staff have yet to be briefed on the full detail and the proposal will need shareholder approval.
The shake up unwinds part of one of the biggest deals the local funds industry has seen in a generation. In 2023, Jarden’s wealth and asset management operations were merged with National Australia Bank’s local arm JBWere New Zealand and assets controlled by private equity firm Pacific Equity Partners to form FirstCape, which today is the parent of JBWere New Zealand, Harbour Asset Management and platform business Consilium. FirstCape sits on roughly 44 billion dollars of funds under management, which makes it the largest wealth manager in the country.
If the latest restructure proceeds as outlined, the practical outcome would be that NAB and Pacific Equity Partners take full control of FirstCape, while Jarden itself shrinks back closer to its origins as a broking and investment banking partnership. Existing Jarden shareholders who want exposure to either side of the business will have to choose which path they back. Some are expected to push back, because the trade off means giving up their stake in one half of the business they already own.
For Jarden staff, the change is more than a corporate diagram. According to the RNZ report, employees would likely be asked to reinvest their bonuses into the new employee owned structure, which would house sharebroking, portfolio management, investment banking and the firm’s financial and economic research services. That is a meaningful ask in a year when bonus cheques are not as fat as they were during the 2021 listings boom, and it sets up an internal debate about whether staff want to lock more of their own savings into a business that already pays their salary.
The proposal also follows reporting in the Australian Financial Review that Pacific Equity Partners has been actively pushing to separate the banking and wealth sides of Jarden. NAB, which has been steadily building out its private wealth offering across the Tasman through JBWere, would gain a tidier ownership line in the largest pool of advised money in New Zealand. For NAB shareholders in Melbourne, that is the kind of clean structure that makes synergies easier to extract, marketing easier to align and group reporting easier to consolidate.
The deal is also the second major change inside the New Zealand investment management sector inside a week, with broader consolidation pressure now visible across the industry. Fee compression, the steady migration of KiwiSaver money to low cost passive funds, the rise of platform businesses like Consilium and FNZ, and the ongoing cost of regulatory uplift under the Financial Markets Authority have all squeezed traditional advice led wealth managers. Bigger players keep getting bigger, while the middle of the market is finding it harder to justify the overhead of remaining a stand alone firm.
Jarden Group executive chair Aidan Allen, who took the top role in 2023 after the FirstCape transaction, has so far not commented publicly on the proposal. Privately, the firm has spent the past two years working to clarify which parts of the business sit where, after a difficult patch that included senior departures, a write down on its Australian expansion ambitions and tighter market conditions for capital raisings. Bringing the investment banking team back inside a tightly held employee owned partnership is, in that context, an attempt to recreate the bare knuckled deal culture that built the firm in the first place.
What this means for ordinary Jarden clients is, on day one, not very much. Sharebroking accounts, KiwiSaver units inside Harbour funds, and adviser relationships at JBWere are all intended to continue without disruption. The change is at the ownership layer, not the customer layer. But over time the strategic direction of the wealth platform will be set in Sydney and Melbourne, while the investment banking and broking team in Auckland and Wellington will live or die by the deal flow they themselves can generate, with their own bonuses on the line in a much more direct way than they have been for the past three years.
It also raises a quieter question for the country as a whole. New Zealand has lost a long list of home grown financial businesses to Australian owners over the past two decades, and the FirstCape transaction was itself a partial sale. If this latest step proceeds, the largest wealth manager in the country will be majority controlled offshore, while the slimmer Jarden that emerges will be a smaller, sharper, locally owned advisory firm. Whether that is a fair swap depends on whether you value scale, or whether you value keeping the country’s biggest pools of savings under domestic control.
What do you think, is Jarden right to refocus on investment banking as an employee owned partnership, or does breaking up the FirstCape vehicle hand too much of New Zealand’s wealth industry to Australian owners? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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