Inside Money: Big and bigger: what does it mean for the little people?

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Check out the latest AMP ASX announcements for further insight into its proposed purchase of the Australasian assets of its long-time number one rival AXA.

Read the attached Explanatory Memorandum (EM) - plus the exciting 'Supplement' - at your leisure. However, you'll need a large amount of leisure time if you intend to digest the 600-plus pages taken up by the EM and Supplement.

But if you narrow it down to the NZ bits, which amount to a page or two, you could save yourself hours of boredom.

Here's what the independent expert (Grant Samuel) has to say about AXA NZ: "... the New Zealand business has more modest prospects... the long term outlook for the New Zealand wealth management market remains less favourable than Australia, given the absence of compulsory superannuation."

Keep that in mind every time you hear heads of wealth management businesses arguing for compulsory KiwiSaver.

Grant Samuel continues: "However, the New Zealand business contributes only a small proportion of the overall earnings generated by AXA..."

While NZ is generally treated as insignificant (or assumed to be Australia-like), the EM does include a few interesting asides about the market here.

For example, Grant Samuel's analysis of how life insurance is bought in NZ (remembering, of course, that life insurance isn't bought, it's sold) includes some figures that may be alarming to the country's traditional independent, or life company-aligned, risk advisers.

Currently, Grant Samuel says, independent and aligned advisers account for about 70 per cent of life insurance sales.

"Given their natural advantages in terms of distribution and sales capabilities, the banks are expected to have approximately half of the market... by 2012," the report says.

Direct sales of life products in NZ are also expected to rise, according to Grant Samuel, as "consumers become increasingly accustomed to the impersonalised relationships that it involves."

Financial advisers, however, remain the most important aspect of the entire AMP/AXA deal. Indeed, as the EM boasts, a merger of the two entities would "form Australia and New Zealand's leading financial planning network with more than 2,900 aligned and employed planners along with access to 6,000 IFAs [independent financial advisers]."

And, even if you discount that last claim of "access to 6,000 IFAs" - anybody can get an email list - it won't necessarily be easy for AMP/AXA to bring together a disparate bunch of 2,900 financial planners under cohesive control.

Or as Grant Samuel puts it in this classic understatement: "Effective management of multiple groups of financial planners will be challenging."