Outpacing the Finfluencers: A Content Playbook for New Zealand Financial Planners

In April 2026, New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority contacted 14 local finfluencers. It was part of a coordinated crackdown on unlawful financial content, run jointly with regulators in 17 countries. The message was clear. Social media has become a genuine source of financial information for New Zealanders, and the regulator is watching closely.

For financial planners, that raises an obvious question. More Kiwis are picking up investment tips from TikTok and Instagram every year. How do you compete for that attention while staying inside the rules that protect your clients? The most useful answer starts with a finding that should change how you think about the problem. Plenty of young New Zealanders use social media for financial information. Very few of them actually trust it.

Why regulators are suddenly paying attention

The FMA’s April action wasn’t a one-off. It followed a new guide released in February 2026, called Talking About Money Online. The guide helps influencers and content creators understand where general commentary ends and regulated advice begins. The line is reasonably simple in principle. General discussion of how a financial product works is fine. Recommending a specific product, fund, or strategy to an individual usually isn’t, unless you hold a Financial Advice Provider licence.

The FMA has also flagged a pattern worth knowing about. It’s called copy trading, where followers are encouraged to mirror a finfluencer’s trades. These offerings are often dressed up with flashy markers of success. Think sports cars, watches, and branded everything. Underneath, they quietly involve complex, high-risk products. After the FMA’s outreach, several finfluencers took down misleading content. Some scaled back their offerings, and others stopped serving New Zealand audiences altogether.

It’s worth remembering this is happening against a backdrop of real growth in the legitimate advice sector. The number of licensed financial advisers in New Zealand grew 8.4% in the year to June 2025, reaching 9,184. Licensed Financial Advice Providers grew 10% over the same period. The profession isn’t shrinking under pressure from finfluencers. If anything, it’s an industry working out how to be heard over the noise.

The opportunity hiding inside the advice gap

It’s tempting to treat finfluencers purely as a threat. The FMA’s own research points to something more useful. There’s a real gap in access to advice, and finfluencers are filling part of it by default.

The FMA’s Access to Financial Advice Review was published in March 2026. It found that only 28% of New Zealanders had accessed financial advice in the previous 12 months. Almost a quarter, 23%, said they hadn’t spoken to anyone about their finances at all. Another 26% said they simply didn’t know where to start. People from lower socio-economic backgrounds, along with Māori and Pasifika communities, were significantly under-represented among those getting advice.

That reframes the problem. The real opportunity isn’t winning an argument with finfluencers online. It’s about becoming the clear, accessible starting point for New Zealanders who want help but don’t know who to ask.

Kiwis are watching, but they’re just not convinced

Finfluencer content clearly has reach. Research from comparison site Finder found that 44% of New Zealand investors under 25 used social media as a source of investment advice. That made it the single most common channel for that age group. The figure drops sharply with age: 25% of millennials, 9% of Gen X, and just 3% of baby boomers said the same.

Reach isn’t the same as trust, though, and that gap is where financial planners have real room to move. An FMA-commissioned survey of more than 2,500 New Zealanders looked at this gap directly. It found that 18 to 24 year olds had surprisingly low trust in some of the platforms they actually use most. Only 11% trusted TikTok as a source of financial information, 12% trusted Instagram, and 14% trusted Facebook. YouTube did far better, trusted by 39% of the same age group.

Young New Zealanders, in other words, are scrolling past plenty of finfluencer content without believing much of it. That’s an opening for a licensed adviser whose content turns up in the same feed with something more credible to say.

The numbers at a glance

• 28% of New Zealanders accessed financial advice in the past 12 months (FMA, 2026)
• 44% of under-25 investors rank social media as their top source of investment ideas (Finder)
• Just 11 to 14% trust TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook for financial information, against 39% for YouTube (FMA-commissioned survey)
• More than three million New Zealanders are on LinkedIn, well ahead of TikTok and most other platforms (DataReportal, NapoleonCat)

What’s worth borrowing from finfluencer content

Some of what makes finfluencer content work isn’t really about finance. It’s basic communication discipline, the kind plenty of professional content forgets.

Plain language is the obvious one. Finfluencers strip out jargon and explain things as though the audience has never come across them before. Most financial planners could do the same without losing any authority. Explaining what a PIE fund or an FAP licence actually means doesn’t make a practice look junior. It makes the content useful to the 26% of New Zealanders who told the FMA they didn’t know where to start.

Consistency matters too. Finfluencers post often enough that their audience starts to expect them. A monthly newsletter, a fortnightly blog post, or a weekly LinkedIn insight can do the same job for a planning practice. The schedule just needs to be realistic enough to actually keep.

Tone is worth a mention as well. Finfluencers often sound like a knowledgeable friend rather than an institution. Planners don’t need to borrow the slang or the urgency. Both would undercut the credibility that sets them apart in the first place. Try writing the way you’d actually explain something in a client meeting. That reads very differently from a disclosure document, and it’s far more likely to get read.

The one place New Zealand planners need to be more careful than the average finfluencer is the line between education and advice. General commentary about how a product or strategy works is fine. A specific recommendation, tailored to one person’s circumstances, usually needs to come from a licensed adviser through an actual advice relationship. Good content explains the concept. It leaves the personalised recommendation for the conversation that follows.

Make your credentials part of the story, not the fine print

Finfluencers have a structural weakness worth turning into content rather than leaving as a line in your bio. Most have no obligation to act in anyone’s interest. They face no disciplinary process if their advice goes wrong, and often have an undisclosed commercial reason for recommending what they recommend.

Licensed financial advisers operate under New Zealand’s Code of Professional Conduct for Financial Advice Services and are required to put clients’ interests first. They’re listed on the Financial Service Providers Register, which anyone can check. If something goes wrong, there’s an actual dispute resolution scheme to turn to, not a comments section.

None of that makes for thrilling content by itself. But explained well, it becomes a real point of difference. What happens if a recommendation turns out to be unsuitable? How does the Code make sure advice fits someone’s real circumstances? Why does an ongoing relationship matter as life changes? Answered in plain language, those are exactly the questions likely to reassure the 23% of New Zealanders who’ve spoken to no one about their finances.

Where to actually show up

New Zealand’s social media habits offer some useful clues about where content effort pays off. InternetNZ’s most recent Internet Insights research found that social media is one of the top three uses of personal time online for 46% of New Zealanders. That figure rises to 60% among 18 to 29 year olds. TikTok and Instagram skew heavily young. 42% of 18 to 29 year olds use TikTok daily, and 56% use Instagram daily, both well above the national average.

LinkedIn tells a different story. It has a large registered base in New Zealand, more than three million members, but lower daily engagement than the more entertainment-led platforms. That fits how most people actually use it: for credibility, referrals, and longer-form thinking, not casual scrolling. For planners building a referral network or working with business owners, it remains the most natural home for considered content.

The practical takeaway is to match the channel to the actual client base, not whichever platform happens to be growing fastest. A practice working with young first-home buyers has good reason to experiment with short, explanatory video. A practice focused on business owners or people approaching retirement is probably better served elsewhere. LinkedIn and a well-written newsletter will do more work there than a TikTok account ever could.

Don’t overlook who the current system misses

The FMA’s access review didn’t just flag a general advice gap. It specifically found that Māori and Pasifika communities, along with people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, were significantly under-represented among New Zealanders getting financial advice.

That’s a planning gap as much as a content one, but content plays a real part in closing it. Generic financial content, written for a default audience, tends to reach people who were already going to find an adviser eventually. Content that reflects different communities, contexts, and starting points reaches a different audience. It reaches people who might otherwise turn to whoever shows up first in their feed, finfluencer or not.

For a sector under pressure to demonstrate real value, this is one of the more straightforward ways to do it.

The bottom line

Finfluencers aren’t going anywhere, and New Zealand’s regulators aren’t finished paying attention to them either. But the more useful story for financial planners isn’t really about out-entertaining creators online. It’s about closing a trust gap and an advice gap that already exist. The content needed is clear, consistent, and honest about what makes professional advice different.

Good content won’t replace the relationship, the licence, or the judgement a real financial plan requires. What it can do is simpler. It helps more New Zealanders find their way to that relationship before a stranger on TikTok gets there first, sports car and all.

If that combination of clarity and credibility is what your content needs, it’s exactly the kind of brief we like at Spruik. We’ve spent more than 25 years helping organisations in complex, regulated sectors simplify what they do and earn trust faster.

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Sources: Financial Markets Authority (Access to Financial Advice Review, March 2026; Global Week of Action Against Unlawful Finfluencers, April 2026; Talking About Money Online guide, February 2026; Financial Advisers Update, November 2025), Finder New Zealand investor research, an FMA-commissioned investor trust survey, InternetNZ Internet Insights 2025, DataReportal Digital 2026: New Zealand, and NapoleonCat New Zealand social media statistics.