Methodology

2. Source priority

For any given field, we apply a fixed source priority. The first source in the list is authoritative; lower-priority sources are kept for cross-validation or freshness fallback.

1. FMA Disclose register — for any field disclosed in the PDS, QFU, SIPO, or AR.
2. IRD KiwiSaver register — for scheme registration, default-scheme designation, member tax credit rules.
3. Sorted Fund Finder — for cross-validation of FMA QFU fee and return labels.
4. FSP Register — for issuer / manager / supervisor FSP numbers and licensing status.
5. Provider website — only for non-financial metadata (logo, brand description). Never for fees or returns.

Full field-by-field source matrix: /sources.

3. How figures are computed

Total 1-year fee

Re-published verbatim from the "Total fees" line of the most recent Quarterly Fund Update (QFU) PDF for each fund. The figure already includes management fees, performance fees, membership fees, expenses, and trustee fees, per the FMA QFU template.

Returns (1y / 3y / 5y)

Re-published from the QFU PDF, expressed after fees and after tax at the top prescribed investor rate (PIR) — the FMA-prescribed disclosure rate. Members on a lower PIR will experience different net returns.

Five-year average is the simple annualised average of the 5 prior years of net returns, exactly as filed. If a fund is younger than 5 years (e.g., many Kernel funds launched 2019–2023), FMA Disclose reports a placeholder zero; we null this value and show N/A so the figure is not mistaken for a real performance reading.

Risk indicator

Re-published verbatim from the PDS — an FMA-defined 1–7 scale based on the five-year standard deviation of weekly returns, per FMA Disclosure Framework.

Provider and manager aggregates

Provider-level AUM, member count, and fund count are arithmetic sums across all the provider's active funds, sourced from the most recent QFU per fund. Manager-level aggregates (on /managers) join across the manager_name field extracted from each scheme's PDS — one manager can manage funds across multiple registered schemes.

Category averages (low-fee, balanced, etc.)

Category averages on the /funds and fee comparison pages are the arithmetic mean of all KiwiSaver scheme funds in that fund_type band (FMA-defined: defensive, conservative, balanced, growth, aggressive). Each fund counts once regardless of AUM.

4. Sanitisation rules

Upstream regulator-filed text occasionally contains phrasing that violates current IRD KiwiSaver® trademark guidance. We rewrite at render time:

• IRD trademark licence s5.4(a) prohibits combining the KiwiSaver mark directly with the word that means "fund". Affected upstream text is rewritten at render time to "fund within a KiwiSaver scheme".
• Pre-2020 fee figures expressed as basis points are normalised to two-decimal-place percentages for comparability.
• Placeholder zero returns on funds younger than 5 years are nulled (rendered as N/A, not as the literal placeholder value).

The pre-commit FMA lint at scripts/audit-fabricated-claims.cjs catches statically-authored violations; the runtime sanitiser handles content arriving from the database at request time.

5. What we deliberately do not publish

• Ratings, "best" designations, or Gold/Silver/Bronze tiers. The FMA opinion-publishing constraint applies to comparison platforms that are not licensed FAPs; we publish facts and let the user judge.
• Forward-looking projections that imply skill rather than scenario. Retirement and fee-impact calculators present scenarios with user-controlled assumptions; we publish no forecast as to relative future performance between funds.
• Personal recommendations. Every comparison view ends with a prompt to consult a licensed financial adviser.
• Member-level data. Everything we publish is fund-level or scheme-level data already public via FMA Disclose.

6. Refresh cadence

• QFU figures (fees, returns, AUM, top holdings): quarterly — refreshed within ~14 days of FMA filing deadline.
• PDS / SIPO / AR documents: ingested on the next ingest run after filing detection.
• Sorted Fund Finder cross-check: continuous.
• IRD KiwiSaver scheme registration: on policy change.

Every entity page carries a data-freshness timestamp (the FMA-filing date for QFU figures, the inserted-at date for DB rows). New filings are surfaced in the /changes.atom feed and in per-fund material-event timelines.

7. AI-readable surfaces

Every fund, provider, manager, and quarterly filing has a JSON facts file and a Markdown summary alongside its HTML page. The complete index lives at /llms-full.txt. AI agents can install the FundCompare MCP server via /mcp-install for programmatic access to compare-funds, get-fund, get-pds-history, and related tools.

Every MCP tool response carries an X-Pangaea-Receipt header for adviser audit trails.

8. Corrections

We treat every reported error as P0. If you believe a figure on the site is wrong — including a misattribution of a fund to a scheme or a stale fee — please contact us via /contact. We publish corrections in the /changes.atom feed within 24 hours of confirmation.