Article written by Jason Choy, InvestNow Senior Portfolio Manager – September 2026

Many New Zealanders who accumulate wealth have traditionally followed a set path: build up some assets, find a wealth manager or investment broker, and have them oversee a portfolio that grows and sets you up for life.

But in 2026, that model is changing.

Looking at our InvestNow customer and portfolio demographics, we’re increasingly seeing investors with large portfolios choosing to take control of their investments themselves.

And it’s not just digital native investors in their twenties leading the way. Often, it’s people in their 40s, 50s and beyond.

This is worth paying attention to because it challenges one of the assumptions that has surrounded DIY investing: that it’s primarily something younger investors do with relatively small amounts of money.

The growth in larger portfolios on InvestNow has been particularly telling¹. While customer numbers have grown strongly over recent years, the growth in larger self-managed portfolios has been even more striking.

In the last 5 years alone:

• The number of portfolios worth more than $1 million on InvestNow increased 5x, compared to a less than 2x increase in customer numbers
• The proportion of customers with six-figure portfolios doubled from around 10% to 20% of all InvestNow accounts.

In other words, the DIY investor is no longer just someone starting out with a few thousand dollars. Increasingly, they’re investors managing substantial wealth.

So what’s changed?

Investing has become easier to understand

The first factor is obvious but important: investing has been democratised.

In other words, the DIY investor is no longer just someone starting out with a few thousand dollars. Increasingly, they’re investors managing substantial wealth.

So what’s changed?

Investing has become easier to understand

The first factor is obvious but important: investing has been democratised.

In the past, accessing a diversified portfolio of professionally managed investments would often involve meetings with advisers, paperwork, substantial minimum investment amounts and a high-touch, ongoing relationship with a wealth manager or broker.

Today, an investor can open an account online, compare investment options, understand the fees they’re paying and build a diversified portfolio with much smaller contributions – all from their living room.

But that’s just the first part of the story.

The second part is that investors have had time to become comfortable with this model.

Someone who started experimenting with a small amount on an online platform a decade or so ago may now have considerably more money to invest.

That investor also has the benefit of experience and comfort using the platform. The tools are familiar and the fundamental principles behind investing are the same, so it matters less that the amounts may be significantly more.

And even if they haven’t personally invested online for years, they’re increasingly surrounded by people who have.

According to the Financial Markets Authority, half a million kiwis were using online platforms to invest in 2021.

What was once considered an alternative way to invest has become mainstream.

The range of investments available has expanded too.  Whether investors want access to domestic shares, global shares, bonds, property, managed funds or ETFs, they can now access almost everything from a single platform.

Access is no longer the barrier it once was.

Confidence is replacing complexity

The internet has made an enormous amount of financial education available.

Podcasts, newsletters, blogs, YouTube channels, AI tools, online communities and independent financial educators have given ordinary investors access to information that once felt gatekept by financial jargon and industry professionals.

The most significant aspect of these resources isn’t that they’re telling people what to invest in. It’s helping them to understand how investing all works, so they can make informed decisions about what’s right for them.

I was recently at an event focused on financial independence, and one theme came through repeatedly: for many people, the biggest barrier isn’t access to suitable investments at all. It’s confidence and getting comfortable with the idea that they’re capable of making the decision themselves.

That’s a very different challenge.

Give someone a blueprint, explain the terminology, show them how the pieces fit together, and suddenly managing their own money can feel much less intimidating.

Financial educators such as Ruth Henderson from The Happy Saver have played an important role in that shift. She engages a large community of self-managed investors, giving them the tools and guidance to become financially independent.

“I answer questions from people about self-managing investments on a daily basis, and there’s a definite rise in the number of those people with hundreds of thousands, or millions to invest,” she says.

 “They genuinely believe they can do a better job themselves, and they are backing up their convictions by reading widely, researching returns of fund managers and comparing them to DIY investors that have gone before.”

She says there’s also a snowball effect, where one DIY investor can empower many others to do the same.

“There is a growing cohort of multimillionaire DIY investors happy to share their experiences and their numbers, so it’s no longer a leap into the unknown.”

Where does that leave financial advisers?

DIY investing doesn’t mean financial advice is becoming irrelevant.

In fact, Financial Markets Authority data actually points in the opposite direction.

The number of licensed financial advice providers increased 10% between 2024 and 2025, while the number of financial advisers increased almost 9% to 9,198.

So the story is not simply that people are abandoning advisers. It’s that the role of advice appears to be changing.

An adviser can be particularly valuable when the questions become more complex: how much can you afford to retire on, how should assets be structured, what are the tax implications of selling a business or a property, how should wealth be passed to the next generation, or how much should you draw from your portfolio each year?

Those are very different questions from deciding which funds to invest in.

Increasingly, many investors appear comfortable handling investment implementation themselves while still seeking professional advice when specialist expertise is genuinely required.

In that sense, DIY investing and financial advice are not necessarily competing alternatives – they can be complementary.

The traditional wealth broker faces a different challenge

This distinction matters because not all advice models face the same pressures.

Many financial advisers focus primarily on long-term planning, coaching, and helping guide clients through major milestones and financial decisions.

The traditional wealth broker model is different.

Historically, broker firms such as Forsyth Barr, Craigs Investment Partners and JBWere, built wealth businesses around constructing bespoke portfolios of individual shares and bonds for clients.

Their service typically combined investment research, stock selection, trading execution and ongoing portfolio management – all leveraging the wider parts of their related investment banking businesses.

For a long time, this made sense. Access to investment research was limited, investing internationally was difficult or expensive, and building a diversified portfolio required considerable expertise and administrative effort.

But technology has changed the equation.

Today, an investor can access diversified portfolios, professional fund managers, global markets, portfolio analytics and extensive educational resources from their laptop or phone. Many of the tasks that once required a broker can now be completed by investors themselves.

That doesn’t automatically make the broker model obsolete. Some investors will continue to value the relationship, personalised service, access to research and reassurance that comes from having an expert involved.

However, investors are increasingly questioning whether those benefits justify the overall cost.

Traditional wealth brokerage relationships often involve multiple layers of fees, including portfolio management fees, custody fees, admin fees, transaction costs and brokerage charges.

Individually, these costs may appear modest. Over decades however, these fees can compound to erode a significant portion off your nest egg.

With a growing number of investors no longer believing they need to pay someone else to select shares and manage a bespoke portfolio on their behalf, it doesn’t necessarily mean the self-directed investors will achieve better (or worse) outcomes.

Investment outcomes depend on a wide range of factors, including an investor’s objectives, behaviour, risk tolerance and the investments they choose.

There are certainly some self-directed investors who trade too frequently, attempt to time markets, or make emotional decisions during periods of volatility. In those situations, professional advice and portfolio management can add significant value.

Equally, there is no guarantee that a professionally managed portfolio will outperform a self-managed diversified portfolio, or a low-cost index fund. Consistently outperforming the broader market is a challenge for any investor, professional or otherwise, and even more so after high fees and costs are taken into account.

As a result, investors are increasingly focusing on the factors they can control.

They may not be able to control market returns, but they can control how much they pay in fees, how tax-efficient their investment structure is, how diversified their portfolio is, and whether they remain disciplined and invested over the long term.

As investors become more confident managing their own portfolios, the bar for what constitutes value from a wealth broker is getting higher.

The challenge for traditional wealth brokers then, isn’t that investors no longer value professional advice.

It’s that investors are increasingly distinguishing between advice they genuinely need and investment management they feel comfortable doing themselves.

From outsourcing to ownership

Perhaps the most interesting change is not that DIY investors are making advisers redundant. As we’ve established, that’s not exactly what’s happening.

It’s that investors increasingly have a genuine choice.

For decades, managing significant wealth largely meant outsourcing investment decisions to a professional. Today, investors can choose how much responsibility they want to take themselves, and how much support they want to pay for.

That support might come from a financial adviser helping with a retirement plan. It might come from an accountant, a lawyer, a tax specialist, or a broker managing an investment portfolio.

Or it might come from a handful of trusted educational resources, online tools and a diversified portfolio of funds that an investor manages themselves.

None of those approaches are inherently right or wrong. The appropriate choice depends on the complexity of the situation, the investor’s level of interest and the value they believe they’re receiving.

DIY – It’s in our DNA

In many ways, this trend feels uniquely Kiwi.

New Zealand has always had a strong DIY culture. We paint our own fences, build our own decks and tackle projects ourselves that people in other countries might immediately outsource to a professional.

Investing is increasingly becoming part of that same mindset.

That doesn’t mean everyone should manage every aspect of their financial well-being. Just as there are some jobs best left to a qualified builder, there are financial situations where professional advice can be enormously valuable.

But the bar has been raised.

Investors are more informed than they were a decade ago. The tools are better. Educational content is everywhere. The blueprint is no longer hidden behind industry jargon or available only to those with professional connections.

As a result, more people are asking a simple question: what am I actually paying for?

For traditional wealth brokers, that’s becoming a more difficult question to answer than it once was.

And for investors with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars invested.

The rise of the DIY investor then isn’t really about technology, apps or online platforms – it’s about investors becoming confident enough to question assumptions that previous generations simply accepted.

One of those assumptions was that significant wealth required paying someone else a significant amount of money to manage it for you.

Increasingly, Kiwi investors are deciding they’d rather keep more of that money themselves.

¹ InvestNow internal customer account data, measured between 2021 – 2026. Figures relate solely to InvestNow customers and are not necessarily indicative of broader market behaviour.

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