From finfluencers and deepfake scams, to the rise of AI-powered investing tips – the risk of financial advice from unregulated sources is increasing. With one in three New Zealanders now using AI to help make investment decisions, Milford Wealth Management Adviser Nicky Reid joins Ryan Bridge to explain what regulated financial advice really looks like, how to spot red flags, and why personalised, accountable advice still matters.

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Bridge talks Business: 28 July 2026
Episode Transcript

Ryan Bridge
Kia ora and welcome to episode 86 of Bridge talks Business with Milford. Did you know one in three of us use AI to help make decisions? I know – this is financial decisions. Much of what we see from so-called Finfluencers online isn’t even regulated, but they’re everywhere and hard to ignore. Milford’s Nicky Reid has tips on how to spot a fake and what regulated financial advice looks like and where to find it. First, here’s your top five business bits.

    1. On the home front, inflation was a touch above where most thought it would be, but the drivers were less worrying. Mostly tradable inflation, which is influenced more by international factors, think oil.
    2. More wage disinflation for the UK labour market last week, which is actually helpful for reducing domestic inflation there. On inflation, the Brit’s CPI was 2.6%, a welcome number for the Bank of England. Despite this, energy prices expected to push it higher again.
    3. The ECB left rates on hold last week but implied a high probability of a hike in September. We also get European PMIs last week, which showed a surprising uplift back into expansionary territory.
    4. Big week ahead for the central banks too. The Fed in the US makes its call. Market pricing implies an almost 40% chance of a hike. We also hear from the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan.
    5. On the macro side, we’ve got about 40% of the S&P 500 reporting earnings. Importantly, this includes the big mega-cap tech companies. So markets are watching closely for insights around demand for AI.

For our feature interview this week, a topic that affects all of us, financial advice, did you know on YouTube, 80% of the so-called Finfluencers who offer such advice have no qualifications in that area whatsoever? This is a study out of the UK. So to get the lowdown on this, we’re talking to Nicky Reid, who is a Wealth Management Adviser at Milford, here in New Zealand, and she’s gonna talk to us about what’s good advice, what’s bad advice, and how to spot the difference when you’re online. Just a reminder that this segment is informational only and should not be considered financial advice. Nicky welcome to the podcast.

Nicky Reid
Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan Bridge
So good to have you here. We’re talking about Finfluencers today. All the trendy people on all the apps who are giving us advice. I mean, you see them all the time. I’ve seen people telling me to buy Bitcoin, people telling me to buy this crypto. What’s the deal here?

Nicky Reid
Look, I guess we all remember the bad old days of the finance companies failing. It feels like a really long time ago. And back in those days, there was no regulation around financial advice. You could literally be a plumber and hang a shingle out saying, “I’m a financial adviser.” You could be bankrupt. You could have criminal convictions. Crazily enough, you didn’t even have to have any experience or even do any research into what you were recommending to clients. And we all know what happened. Diversification in those days for investors was how many finance companies am I in? Not am I in shares, bonds, cash? Am I invested in New Zealand, Australia and globally? Diversification was just having lots of different finance company investments. And it was allowed because there was no regulation. And we’ve moved a long way now here in New Zealand. We don’t have the lack of regulation. There are an awful lot of safeguards and requirements of financial advisers in New Zealand now. But we live in an increasingly digital world. And so now you’ve gone from sitting across the table from someone who’s giving you financial advice but wasn’t regulated in those days, to now it’s on your devices. It’s AI. It’s Finfluencers, people on TikTok.

Ryan Bridge
And it’s everywhere. It’s like ubiquitous.

Nicky Reid
It is. It really is everywhere. And as we turn more increasingly to large language models, AI, social media for information. And we hoover – this is new and exciting. It’s a new shiny thing, Ryan. The dangers are now moved from somebody sitting across the desk purporting to be a financial adviser to someone giving you advice via social media or on your screen.

Ryan Bridge
You mentioned AI. And I want to come back into what exactly is and isn’t regulated and who is and isn’t regulated in a second. Because I think it would be good for people to know. But with AI, apparently one third of us now use AI in some way to help us make financial decisions. Is that smart? Because, as you said, it kind of bottom trawls the internet for information. So presumably there will be some nuggets of gold amongst that.

Nicky Reid
Look, absolutely. AI has its place. It’s certainly a time-saving thing for a lot of us, personally and professionally. But where it’s limitations are is that it’s not a human. It can’t understand what your goals are, what your financial background is, what your circumstances are, how you feel about investment risk. And so it’s a wonderful source of increasing your education and giving you information. But I don’t believe it should be used to provide you with financial advice because it simply is just regurgitating whatever the patterns show and the data that it’s seeking that information from.

Ryan Bridge
And the pattern might not be right.

Nicky Reid
Correct.

Ryan Bridge
Might not be accurate.

Nicky Reid
It can be biased. It can be outright wrong. As we all know at the bottom of every AI search that we use, “this is not necessarily correct information”. You should double check this. Well, you don’t want to be banking your financial future on something that has just been made up for you. They call it hallucinating. Essentially, AI and large language models, they really want to please us. They want to give us the right answer. It may not be the right answer. It may not even be a truthful answer. So when it comes to understanding the complexity of financial concepts and understanding investing, that’s terrific because if it’s factual, I think that’s safe. But when it delves into advice, I think that’s where the danger lies.

Ryan Bridge
And the problem is you don’t know what they know and don’t know and what’s real, right?

Nicky Reid
Correct. And it doesn’t know you, more importantly. It has absolutely no idea – unless you’re willing to feed into the internet, which I’m not sure many of us would like to.

Ryan Bridge
Here’s my bank statement!

Nicky Reid
Here’s my balance sheet. And again, how do you even know that what it’s going to spit out is correct?

Ryan Bridge
Nicky, so you talked about legitimate or regulated financial advisers. How do I know who’s legit, who’s not, who’s regulated, who’s not, or who’s registered and who’s not?

Nicky Reid
Well, anybody that you are going to meet with from a fund manager, a bank, a financial services organisation that operates in New Zealand, I don’t think you should have any concerns that they are not authorised to provide financial advice. So, first of all, when you sit down with a financial adviser, they need to give you their disclosure statement, which explains a lot of the things that never used to be regulated. Talking about how we manage conflicts of interest, how we are paid for the advice that we give, how we charge our clients for the advice that we give. Um, you know, talking about our experience and qualifications. Anybody who’s providing you with financial advice in New Zealand should be able to give you that disclosure statement. And you should be able to look them up on the Financial Service Provider Register, the FSPR, and you should look up their FSP number. And then you can be sure that who you are talking to has the minimum qualifications and experience required and is doing their ongoing competency. So, it’s really important as well that we’re not just “tick a box and you’re a shiny new financial adviser”. You have to keep up with what’s going on in the world.

Ryan Bridge
Because a lot of the Finfluencers, I mean, my interpretation of what they’re doing, is that there’ll be kickbacks. They’re not giving you financial advice. They’re promoting a product without necessarily telling you they’re promoting a product or having to. But with financial advisers, do they have to say, I mean, you mentioned that disclosure statement that says, this is where I’m getting paid. Who’s paying me. Where am I? You know, full disclosure discrepancy.

Nicky Reid
Yep, absolutely. So the Finfluencers, most of them won’t be giving you any semblance of disclosure because they’re probably not even aware of the regulations. They probably aren’t even operating in New Zealand. So they wouldn’t have a clue about New Zealand financial advice regulations. But wherever they are in the world, there’s got to be some regulations and they’re probably breaching them. The FMA has been cracking down on Finfluencers here in New Zealand and issued warnings to 14 people recently to essentially cease and desist. So yeah, anybody who’s providing financial advice should be telling you how they get paid for the advice that they are giving and whether there is a conflict in what they’re telling you. And that is something that Finfluencers, social media, AI, you’re not going to get any of that disclosure at all. And therefore no accountability as well, if the advice is wrong.

Ryan Bridge
Nicky, I’ve always been told, it was granddad who used to say, look after your pennies and the pounds take care of themselves. What’s the best piece of financial advice you’ve ever been given? Do you reckon?

Nicky Reid
I think experience has taught me that really managing your emotions is probably the number one thing that people can do to aid themselves financially. Essentially, investing is a very logical thing, right? We want to make money, we want to meet our goals and we’re going to invest to achieve that. But along the way, you’ll come across periods where you’re either being driven by fear or by greed. And that’s the challenge – is to not get dragged around by those emotions. A really easy way to lose money is either to cut your losses when you’re worried about what’s going on in the world, thinking about times like 2020 and Covid, you know, that six weeks was pretty hair raising – quickest, biggest drop in markets in history. Nobody wanted to do that again. And it was hard to sit on your hands. But it was exactly what people should do unless they had another reason they really needed that money out. But that’s where you make a loss is by letting the fear take over. The first half of this year has not been particularly easy.

Ryan Bridge
Or last year.

Nicky Reid
Well, yeah, it’s been a little bit of a roller coaster. And so what you need to do is remember your long-term goals. And also on the other side of the flip of the coin, not worrying  just about the fear, but also the greed side of it. At the moment, we see a lot of people chasing return because they are seeking the eye-watering returns, they read headlines. But what they’re not taking into account is the risk behind that and not considering what their risk profile, what their goals are. Essentially, what we want is the Goldilocks porridge, right? That’s not too hot, not too cold. Why take on more risk than you need to necessarily, to achieve the goal that you have. So, I think that’s really important – it’s managing your emotions. And I genuinely believe that’s where financial advice is really helpful because AI is not going to counsel you to do that. Your Finfluencers are talking to millions of people. They’re not talking to you. They don’t know about you. They don’t know about your parents losing money in ‘87. And that indelibly affecting how you feel about investing, or you yourself losing money in the GFC.

Ryan Bridge
We’re hearing from psychologist, Nicky now, aren’t we? That’s what you studied though, right?

Nicky Reid
That is right. Yeah, I did my degree in psychology at Canterbury.

Ryan Bridge
It’s fascinating.

Nicky Reid
Yeah, look, it is. And that’s the challenge  – mastering your emotions while investing is easier said than done. I get the question – whether it’s thinking about 2022, really tough year in markets. What shall I do, Nicky? Probably nothing. Let’s talk about what’s going on, what we’re doing about it. Let’s try and limit how much you’re logging in so you’re not driving yourself crazy. And let’s take a long-term view of this because we never want any client to have a loss or make a bad financial decision. And that’s the power of financial advice – is stepping in before a client makes a bad decision that they can’t undo. If you crystallise that loss by pulling your money out at the wrong time, that’s gone. That’s absolutely gone.

Ryan Bridge
Don’t follow your heart, follow the advice.

Nicky Reid
Try and let your brain take over and listen to your adviser because with an adviser, there should be no conflict of interest there. They have to legally declare it. Yeah, and have your best interests at heart and really want you to achieve your goals.

Ryan Bridge
Nicky, fantastic “advice” from you on the podcast. Thank you very much for being with me.

Nicky Reid
No problem. Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan Bridge
That was Nicky Reid, Wealth Management Adviser at Milford, talking to us about financial advice, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Just a reminder, you can like, follow, and subscribe this podcast wherever you like to listen. Until next week, don’t forget to invest in yourselves.

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