Terms of Use — Vestro

These Terms of Use are the agreement between you and Vestro. They explain what Vestro does, what it does not do, and what you are agreeing to when you create an account or use the service. They are written to be read by a person, not a lawyer, so please read them before you sign up.

In short: Vestro is an education and portfolio-understanding tool. It is not a broker, it does not hold your money, it does not place trades, and it does not give financial advice or tell you what to buy or sell. Investments can fall as well as rise, and you can lose money.

1. About these Terms

These Terms apply to the Vestro website, the Vestro mobile app, and everything we provide through them ("Vestro", "the service").

Vestro is operated in New Zealand by its founders as an unincorporated business. Where these Terms say "we", "us" or "our", they mean that operator. Our contact details are in section 15.

By creating an account, or by using Vestro, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not accept them, please do not use Vestro.

If you are using Vestro on behalf of someone else, you confirm you have their authority to accept these Terms for them.

2. What Vestro is — and what it is not

What Vestro is. Vestro is a tool for understanding a portfolio you already own. You give us information about your holdings, and we show you what you own in plain English: how your money is spread across your holdings, sectors and cash; which holdings make up the largest share of your portfolio; how your reported values have moved between imports; and a short written summary of what those figures show. We also publish general education content about investing.

What Vestro is not. It is important that you understand the limits of what we do:

Vestro is not a broker or a trading platform. We cannot buy, sell, hold or transfer anything for you, we cannot place orders, and we cannot move money in or out of your brokerage account.
Vestro does not hold your money or your investments. We never hold client money or client property, and we have no ability to move funds.
Vestro is not a financial advice provider. We are not licensed, authorised or registered by the Financial Markets Authority, and we do not provide financial advice or a financial advice service within the meaning of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013.
Vestro is not a personalised recommendation service. We do not recommend that you buy, sell or hold any investment, we do not tell you whether an investment is suitable for you, and we do not design or recommend an investment plan for you.
Vestro is not a tax, legal or accounting service. We do not prepare tax returns, calculate tax, or give tax, legal or accounting advice.
Vestro is not a substitute for your own judgement or for professional advice. What you do with your money is your decision.

How the analysis works. Vestro applies a fixed scoring model to the structure of the portfolio information you give us. The model describes what you own in factual terms. It does not take into account your income, your debts, your other assets, your tax position or your time horizon, and we have not assessed whether any investment is suitable for you. The goals and experience answers you give during onboarding are used only in that onboarding session and are not part of the analysis. Where you choose a risk-sensitivity setting, that setting changes which thresholds the model displays against; it is not an assessment of what is right for you.

Vestro Intelligence. You can ask Vestro Intelligence questions about investing and about your portfolio. Its answers are written by software from general information and your portfolio's figures, and no person checks them before you see them. They are general information, not financial advice: Vestro Intelligence does not know your whole situation, it does not tell you to buy, sell or hold anything, and its answers can be incomplete or wrong. Check anything important before you rely on it, and see section 3.

Investor levels. Your investor level reflects how long you have used Vestro and how your portfolio's health score has looked over time. It is a way to see your progress in the app. It is not a measure of your skill as an investor, a rating of your investments, or a suggestion to change them.

3. Investing risk and things we cannot promise

By using Vestro you acknowledge and agree that:

Investments can fall as well as rise. The value of investments is not guaranteed and you can lose money, including all of the money you invest.
Past performance is not a guide to future returns. Any historic figure we show, including market index or benchmark figures, is history, not a forecast.
We may show estimates. Some figures are estimates based on current market data or on the information you supplied, and they may be wrong, delayed, incomplete or out of date. Our market data comes from third-party providers and may be delayed or unavailable.
Changes in portfolio value are not investment performance. When Vestro compares reported values between imports, it is comparing reported account values. It does not adjust for deposits, withdrawals, trades, fees, taxes or exchange-rate movements, so a change is not a measure of how your investments performed.
We do not know your whole situation. We do not know your income, your debts, your other investments, your tax position or your goals, and we have not considered whether anything is suitable for you.
Consider getting advice. If you are unsure, consider talking to a licensed financial adviser or a Financial Advice Provider. You can check whether someone is licensed on the Financial Markets Authority's register at https://fma.govt.nz.

Nothing in Vestro is a recommendation or an opinion about any particular investment. Where we publish education content, it is general information about kinds of investments and how investing works, not advice about what you should do.

4. Who can use Vestro

To create an account and use Vestro you must:

be 18 years or older. Vestro is not designed for children, and we do not knowingly allow anyone under 18 to hold an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete the personal information in it as described in our Privacy Policy;
be able to enter into a binding contract with us;
provide accurate information about yourself, and keep it up to date; and
use Vestro for your own private purposes.

Vestro is designed for people in New Zealand. We may not be able to provide the service in other countries, and the information we show (including currency, market data and tax-related content) is prepared with New Zealand users in mind.

One account per person, please. Accounts are personal to you and cannot be transferred or sold.

5. Your account and its security

You are responsible for everything that happens through your account. That includes keeping your password confidential, choosing a strong password, keeping your email account secure, and telling us promptly at [email protected] if you think someone else has accessed your account.

If we believe your account has been compromised, is being misused, or is being used in a way that risks harm to you, to us or to anyone else, we may suspend access while we investigate.

6. Importing your portfolio information

You can give us information about your portfolio by connecting your brokerage account read-only through Akahu, the connection service Vestro uses. Akahu is a New Zealand company that links your brokerage account to Vestro once you approve it, and it is how your portfolio information reaches us. We may offer other import methods from time to time. Vestro does not import portfolio information by email.

When you import information you confirm that:

you authorise us to collect your portfolio information from Akahu on your behalf, and to ask Akahu for it, while the connection is open;
the information belongs to you, or you have the authority of the owner to share it with us;
you are allowed to share it with us, and doing so does not breach any agreement you have with your broker or anyone else; and
you understand that we cannot trade, transfer or withdraw anything on your behalf, and that importing information does not give us any ability to do so.

Importing copies the information that reaches us — a message you send us, or the account you connect. Its accuracy depends entirely on where it came from, so what you see in Vestro can be no more accurate than that. If a holding, value or date looks wrong, check it with your broker.

Any import method we offer that connects to a third-party service is read-only from your point of view: it brings information in, and it cannot change anything at the other end. The Akahu connection is read-only in the same way. Vestro asks Akahu only for the account information you approve, so neither we nor Akahu is given the ability to place a trade, move money or withdraw anything for you through it — and Vestro never asks for, and never receives, your brokerage password.

7. What you must not do

You must not, and must not allow anyone else to:

use Vestro for anything unlawful, or in any way that infringes anyone's rights;
try to access, view, copy or interfere with any other user's information, or attempt to break or bypass our security, authentication or access controls;
scrape, crawl, harvest, copy or bulk-extract data from Vestro, or access it using automated tools other than as we permit;
reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive the source code, model or logic of Vestro, or copy any part of it;
resell, sublicense, white-label or otherwise make Vestro available to anyone else as a service;
send us files or content that contain malware, or that you do not have the right to share;
impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your identity or your connection to any person or organisation; or
use Vestro, or anything it shows you, to give financial advice or a financial advice service to anyone else, whether paid or unpaid.

We may suspend or close the account of anyone who breaches this section.

8. Our content, and the information you give us

Everything we create — the Vestro name and brand, the app and its design, our text and education content, and the analysis, scores, flags and written summaries we produce — belongs to us. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use Vestro for your own private use while you have an account, subject to these Terms.

The information you give us stays yours. You give us permission to store it, process it, analyse it and show it back to you so we can run the service. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

If you send us feedback, ideas or suggestions, we may use them to improve Vestro without any obligation to you.

9. Subscriptions and fees

Vestro Pro. Vestro offers a paid subscription in the app, Vestro Pro, billed monthly or annually. The app shows you what is included, the price and the billing period before you subscribe, and you are not charged unless you confirm the purchase.

Apple takes the payment. Subscriptions are bought through Apple's App Store and charged to your Apple account. Apple's own terms apply to the payment, and we never see your card or bank details. Prices are shown in New Zealand dollars and include GST.

Renewal and cancelling. A subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, at the price shown, unless you cancel it at least 24 hours before it renews. You can cancel, or change plan, at any time in your Apple account's subscription settings; the app links you there. If you cancel, you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for, and you are not charged again. Deleting your Vestro account does not cancel a subscription with Apple, so please cancel it there as well.

Refunds. Refund requests for App Store purchases are made to Apple and decided under Apple's refund policy. Nothing in this section limits your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986 (see section 12).

Free trial. A new account gets 7 days of Vestro Pro free, starting when you sign up. You do not give a card, and nothing is charged when the trial ends. After that, unless you subscribe or have free access another way (described below), the app stays locked until you subscribe. Your account and the information in it are kept while it is locked, and you can still delete your account (section 11). There is one free trial per person: we may end trials obtained with accounts created to collect them.

Free-access codes. We sometimes give people a code that unlocks Vestro Pro without payment, for example testers or reviewers, or we switch free access on for their account directly. A code is personal to the person we gave it to, and we may end the free access it gives with reasonable notice.

Inviting friends. Every account has a personal invitation code and link. When someone you invite enters your code before they import their first portfolio, and then imports their first portfolio, they get one month of Vestro Pro free, added after their free trial. You get one month of Vestro Pro free when the first person you invite does this, and another when the third person does: two free months for inviting people, at most, in total. After that you can keep sharing your code, and the people who join with it still get their free month; you just do not earn more. If someone you invited deletes their account, a free month you have already earned is not earned again. Free months you are given run one after another, never at the same time. If you already pay for Vestro Pro through Apple, your free month comes as an App Store offer code instead, which Apple applies at your next renewal: redeem it before the date shown, or it expires. Free months and codes have no cash value and cannot be exchanged or transferred. A code can be added only once, you cannot use your own, and we may refuse or withdraw free months obtained by misusing the programme, for example with accounts created to collect them.

The founder offer. If you joined through an invitation, or you have earned a free month by inviting someone, then 3 days before your free trial and free months end we may offer you Vestro Pro for a one-off payment of NZ$249 through the App Store, with no subscription after that. Free months you earn by inviting people before then move the offer back with them. If you already pay for Vestro Pro through Apple when you earn a free month by inviting someone, the offer appears when you earn it. It is limited to the first 50 people who buy it, and it is open to you for 14 days. The number of places left that we show you is a real count of purchases. If the places run out while the offer is open to you, it closes. Buying it means you keep Vestro Pro for as long as we provide Vestro Pro, without paying again. It is not a promise that the service will continue for any particular length of time, and section 10 still applies. If you already have a subscription, cancel it with Apple after buying the founder offer, or Apple will keep charging you for it.

The discount offer. If you do not take the founder offer, or none are left, we may instead give you an App Store offer code for 25% off a monthly Vestro Pro subscription for your first 3 months, after which the normal monthly price applies unless you cancel. It is for people who have not subscribed before, and it must be redeemed within the time shown.

Price changes. If we change the price of a subscription, Apple will tell you before the new price applies and, where Apple's rules require it, ask you to agree to it. You can cancel before it applies.

Changes to what is included. We may change what Vestro Pro includes as the product develops. If we make a change that materially reduces what you get, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

10. Availability and changes to the service

Vestro is under active development, and some features may be incomplete, changing, or shown as coming soon. We will try to keep Vestro available and working, but we do not promise that it will always be available, uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, add, replace or withdraw features; carry out maintenance; or discontinue the service.

We rely on third-party services (for example, our hosting, our database provider, our connection service and market-data providers). We are not responsible for interruptions or inaccuracies that come from those services, although we will try to handle them sensibly.

If we are going to withdraw the service entirely, we will give you reasonable notice so you can retrieve your information or delete your account.

11. Ending your account

You can delete your account at any time in the app, under Account. Deleting your account ends this agreement. Your information is deleted as described in our Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or end your access to Vestro if you breach these Terms, if we are required to do so by law, or if we discontinue the service. Where we can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to retrieve your information first.

Sections 7, 8, 12 and 14 continue to apply after your account ends.

12. Our responsibility to you

We provide Vestro with care, but we provide it "as is". We do not promise that the information you see is accurate, complete, current or suitable for your purposes, and we do not promise any particular outcome from using Vestro.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for:

indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or loss of profit, savings, opportunity, reputation or data; or
any investment loss, or any loss arising from a decision you make, or do not make, after using Vestro or relying on anything it shows you.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986, or any other rights you have that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. If any part of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest of them continue to apply.

13. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms as Vestro develops, or if the law changes. The version and the date these Terms take effect are shown at the top of this page. If we change them, we will publish the new version and ask you to accept it before it applies to you — we do not assume that accepting an old version means accepting a new one. If you do not accept the new version, you can stop using Vestro and delete your account. Continuing to use Vestro after the effective date means the new version applies.

14. Governing law

These Terms are governed by New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

15. Contact us

Questions about these Terms, or notices to us, can be sent to [email protected].

Vestro, Dunedin, New Zealand.

For privacy requests, including access to or correction of your personal information, see our Privacy Policy or email [email protected].