Former Kiwi Wealth boss turns to advice

McKinnon has recently founded Cass Advice, initially targeting KiwiSaver.

“I’ve been thinking about financial advice for years, ever since I left Kiwi Wealth,” she said, “and how to close the advice gap that the FMA is so keen for us to do.”

She said she had always thought the way to deliver unconflicted advice was to offer a user-pays model but it had not been the way of the New Zealand market.

But in the middle of last year she started to wonder, with the proliferation of AI tools, whether the cost could be brought down to the level where the price point could be low enough that New Zealand consumers might be able to afford to pay for it.