Sam Stubbs

Sam Stubbs is a New Zealand fund manager and the founder of Simplicity, the not-for-profit KiwiSaver provider that set out to prove low fees and long-term thinking could outperform the industry.

Stubbs came to Simplicity with a career in institutional finance: ten years at Goldman Sachs in London and Hong Kong, followed by stints as Managing Director of Hanover Group and CEO of Tower Investments, which was itself a KiwiSaver default provider. He knew the industry from the inside and he was not impressed. In his own words, he became “probably the most hated person in finance”, because he publicly argued that most KiwiSaver providers were charging too much for too little.

In 2016, Stubbs and a group of friends founded Simplicity around a kitchen table. The model was deliberately disruptive: a not-for-profit structure, index-fund investing, a flat management fee of 0.31 per cent and a commitment to giving 15 per cent of all fees to the Simplicity Foundation, which distributes to New Zealand charities. The fund manager itself is 100 per cent owned by the Foundation, ensuring the organisation thinks and invests for its members rather than external shareholders.

Simplicity has since grown to manage more than billion in funds and was appointed as one of New Zealand’s default KiwiSaver providers: a validation of the low-fee, member-first model Stubbs built.

Stubbs’s profile is noteworthy because he used his Goldman Sachs pedigree to build the antithesis of Wall Street: a not-for-profit fund manager that has forced the entire New Zealand KiwiSaver industry to justify its fees and proved that a founder can build something significant by charging less, not more.

Sam features in our look at how NZ fintech founders disagree about money.

Sources: Simplicity · NZ Herald · Wao