The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) - Te Mana Tātai Hokohoko - today published its annual report for the year to 30 June 2025 following the report being tabled in Parliament.
The report details the FMA's strategic objectives (evolving our outcomes-focused approach, evolving our intelligence-led approach, deterring harmful unregulated activities and deterring misleading and deceptive practices) and core function (licensing, monitoring and supervision, investigation and enforcement, policy and guidance).
FMA Chief Executive, Samantha Barrass, said: "This year has seen tangible differences made in the pursuit of our statutory purpose of promoting and facilitating the development of fair, efficient and transparent financial markets."
Highlights include:
- The publication of our approach to outcomes-focused regulation, which contains the broad strokes of what industry can expect from us
- Publication of the Financial Conduct Report, setting out our regulatory priorities for the coming year.
- Ramping up engagement with industry and consumer groups, including a programme of roundtables.
- The introduction of the Conduct of Financial Institutions (CoFI) legislation, extending conduct regulation to cover day-to-day banking and insurance providers
- Preparation for the transfer of responsibility for the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act
- Progressing the FinTech Sandbox, an engagement-led programme aimed at supporting the development innovative digital products
- Working with MBIE on significant policy programmes in areas such as capital markets reforms, and scams
- Granted class and individual exemptions to avoid unnecessary regulatory burden and to ensure that regulatory requirements do not restrict New Zealanders' access to financial services and products
- A number of enforcement successes, including insider trading prosecution over the sale of Pushpay shares
- Preparing to bed in the Contracts of Insurance Act 2024 that modernises insurance contracts law.
"At the same time, the breadth of enforcement activity and outcomes demonstrates we are still focused on taking action where consumers have not received fair treatment.
"I am also pleased with results from our emphasis on increased financial discipline, tighter cost controls and careful reprioritisation of work across the organisation designed to ensure resources are focused on where they deliver the most value.
"The net deficit for this year is lower than budgeted, primarily due to higher-than-expected revenue and lower overall operating expenditure.
"We have achieved or substantially achieved 9 out of 12 SPEs. Our targets and our performance were raised so in some cases we did not meet our targets despite improved performance.
"Where we have not achieved our targets, we will focus to continue to lift our results."
2025 Ease of Doing Business Survey
Together with the annual report, the FMA released its annual 'Ease of doing business' report, which surveys stakeholders and industry participants to understand the effectiveness of their interactions with the FMA, and their views on FMA's overall effectiveness in delivering its mandate. The survey forms part of the FMA's reporting on its performance measures.
FMA Chief Executive, Samantha Barrass, said: "After a decline across a number of key indicators in last year's 2024 EODB survey and a year of hard work and extensive industry engagement we are pleased to see better results from this year's survey.
"We are on track, and aim to continue this momentum, reflecting on feedback received from the survey and from stakeholders throughout the year to further enhance our industry engagement.
"In particular, we have seen positive results for a number of measures relating to communications and engagement.
"Overall belief that the FMA's actions help raise standards of market conduct and integrity is up slightly, at 82 per cent this year, but still behind our ambitious 90 per cent target.
"As well as improved perceptions of our engagement activity we have seen increased agreement that the FMA is focused on outcomes that matter for consumers and markets and that our regulatory approach is supporting industry.
"We have also seen strong improvement in the area of communications, with a jump from 63 per cent (2024) to 74 per cent (2025) finding FMA communication clear, concise and effective.
"This has flowed through to a rise in the percentage of people who positively regard our ability to help stakeholders understand their obligations as a market participant.
"It is clear, however, that we have work to do in the area of improving our systems and processes. We acknowledge continued low agreement that the FMA develops and implements streamlined systems and processes for licensed entities at 55 per cent this year compared to 48 per cent last year.
"This may be impacting somewhat on whether stakeholders agree it is easy doing business with the FMA, although this result has improved to 56 per cent compared to last year's 53 per cent.
"We are committed to improving and modernising our systems, to uplift performance and support new features.
"In particular, work is underway to reduce the unnecessary burden by improving and automating many systems including simplifying and introducing automation to key processes, like exemption requests, to reduce manual workload and improve turnaround times, enhancing our website by introducing AI-powered search to improve accessibility and user experience, progressing single licensing to simplify compliance for entities holding multiple licenses and more enhancements to our online services function that aims to use AI.
"We also acknowledge results showing a drop in stakeholder confidence and perceptions of market integrity, although respondents are split in their reasoning. We note comments vary between those who favour more enforcement and those who favour lighter regulation, perhaps reflecting tensions in the balance the FMA seeks to strike - between the need to make it easier for the financial sector to do business with the need to ensure integrity."
2025 Ease of Doing Business Survey
