Every licensed insurer in New Zealand is required to hold a financial strength rating and disclose it to clients before a policy is signed or renewed. What the law does not require is that those ratings appear anywhere in one place, or in a format that allows comparison across agencies.
Consumer finance platform MoneyHub has stepped into that gap with an updated guide compiling the ratings of nearly 40 licensed insurers across general, life, health, and specialty lines, verified against the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s (RBNZ) public register and each insurer’s own disclosures. Ratings span from AA (Very Strong) to B (Fair), with most major carriers sitting in the A range or above.
For consumers, it is a convenience. For brokers, it sits in a context that is becoming harder to ignore.
Under Section 60 of the Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Act 2010 (IPSA), a licensed insurer must hold a current financial strength rating given by an approved rating agency. The Reserve Bank has approved three agencies: A.M. Best, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings. The Reserve Bank is also required to keep a public register of licensed insurers and their current financial strength ratings.
Insurers are required to disclose the current rating to the policyholder before entering into or renewing a contract of insurance. That obligation sits with the insurer – but for a broker placing risk on behalf of a client, the underlying due diligence question does not change.
MoneyHub founder Christopher Walsh identified the cross-agency comparison problem as the practical challenge at the centre of the issue. “The three agencies use different scales, and that catches people out. A.M. Best’s ‘A (Excellent)’ and S&P’s ‘A (Strong)’ sit in similar territory wearing different words, while ‘B+’ means Good on A.M. Best’s scale but a ‘B’ from S&P means Weak. You can’t compare letters across agencies,” Walsh said.
A broker presenting competing quotes from carriers rated by different agencies cannot rely on letter grades alone. A client briefed only on a letter – without knowing which agency issued it – may draw the wrong conclusion about their insurer’s financial position.
The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) published its second annual Financial Conduct Report (FCR) on June 30, 2026, setting out priorities for the 2026/27 year. Managing conflicts from remuneration structures is one of four named cross-sector themes applying directly to financial advice providers – a category that includes insurance brokers.
FMA executive director of licensing and conduct supervision Clare Bolingford addressed the commission focus directly: “We do think that a range of remuneration models support good access to advice, so it’s not that we’re saying commission itself, you know, is bad or we don’t like it, but what we are concerned about is how the risks of conflicts of interests are being managed within remuneration models.”
That scrutiny sits alongside existing professional obligations. The Insurance Brokers Association of New Zealand (IBANZ) Code of Professional Conduct, effective November 1, 2025, sets out as an overriding obligation that all members must conduct business with integrity. Under Standard 3, financial advice must be suitable for the client – with reasonable grounds defined as those a prudent person engaged in the occupation of giving financial advice would consider appropriate. Standard 4 requires members to take reasonable steps to ensure the client understands the advice, including its content, risks, and consequences.
Those standards do not explicitly name financial strength ratings. But placing a client with a carrier without being able to clearly interpret – or explain – that carrier’s rating sits uncomfortably against a suitability standard, particularly when the FMA is actively scrutinising how brokers manage conflicts in carrier selection.
Walsh cited the AMI Insurance collapse as the benchmark for why financial strength ratings carry real consequence. “A financial strength rating measures one thing: an insurer’s ability to pay claims when it counts. The collapse of AMI after the Christchurch earthquakes showed New Zealanders that insurers don’t have unlimited resources,” he said.
At the time of the Canterbury earthquakes, AMI had 485,000 policyholders and 1.2 million policies. The government announced a support package of up to $500 million, according to interest.co.nz. The Spinoff later reported the total cost of the bailout reached $1.48 billion.
The Reserve Bank is overhauling IPSA. In August 2025, Cabinet agreed to a set of recommendations to progress an Amendment Bill, with substantive provisions targeted for commencement in 2028.
A disclosure standard is among the changes under consideration. A Reserve Bank Cabinet paper released as part of the IPSA review states that a proposed standard would regulate the disclosure and publication of information by insurers, enhance market discipline, and potentially provide for comparability of insurers by the public.
That word – “potentially” – matters. According to Buddle Findlay’s analysis of the exposure draft, standards development and consultation will follow from 2028, with standards expected to be issued and in effect by 2032. Any comparability mechanism is at minimum six years away. In the meantime, the information remains scattered across dozens of insurer websites.
Walsh said the guide would be reviewed every six months, with interim updates when individual ratings change. “Every rating in the guide has been verified against the Reserve Bank’s register and each insurer’s own disclosure, and we’ll re-check the whole page every six months and update sooner when a rating moves. If a reader spots anything out of date, they can report it on the page in seconds – no name or email needed,” he said.
