Matthew Esler

Padua Solutions (Padua) today announced a major expansion of the Padua Advice Portal (the Portal), with AUSIEX joining as exclusive broking partner.

Padua Solutions CEO & Managing Director, Matthew Esler said advice firms and licensees increasingly need technology that connects every stage of the advice process, from client engagement and advice generation, through to implementation and compliance.

“The Padua Portal is an advice ecosystem that provides the connective tissue for the next phase of advice delivery in Australia,” he said. “We want to enable advisers to deliver more good advice to more clients, by giving them the infrastructure to do it efficiently and at scale.”

The expanded Portal, which can be fully white-labelled, quickly connects institutional partners through a single advice workflow layer. It is designed to deliver:

• Advice generation efficiency – reducing manual work and duplication across client discovery, advice generation and implementatio
• Client and member engagement – supporting both advised and non-advised engagement journeys through digital tools and connected data
• Integration and implementation connectivity – enabling wealth platforms, broking platforms, super funds and insurance providers to connect into advice workflows
• Compliance evidence – improving file quality, auditability and oversight through structured workflows and retained advice evidence
• Open, connected infrastructure – to help advisers efficiently scale from servicing around 100+ clients today, to 300 or more

“These capabilities are increasingly important as superannuation funds, platforms, licensees and advice groups look for scalable ways to address ‘the last mile of advice’,” Mr Esler said.

The ‘last mile’ is a term borrowed from logistics. It reflects the idea that while a parcel can travel 1,000 kilometres across the country efficiently, the final few hundred metres to the customer’s front door is often the greatest challenge and the most expensive.

“In financial advice, the last mile is about bridging the gap between advice and implementation,” Mr Esler said. “The Portal helps complete the last mile by connecting members and clients with the broader advice process.”

A core feature of the expanded Portal is its ability to support Application Programming Interface (API) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration between advice firms, licensees and institutional partners.

“These integrations reduce manual handling, improve implementation accuracy and support straight-through processing across platform, investment, broking and insurance workflows,” Mr Esler said. “The objective is to reduce friction in the advice process without compromising quality, control or compliance oversight.”

The expanded portal includes:

• Pre-advice engagement and discovery
  • Client View: Modular client engagement portal supporting different client or entity structures
  • WealthX: Open banking capability with Consumer Data Right (CDR)-enabled data capture: income and expenses, property valuations and mortgages
  • Wealth Review: Interactive whole-of-wealth dashboard combining personal and financial information into a single digital view of a client’s financial position
• Advice generation and quality assurance
  • Advice Guidance: Advisers strategise directly with Padua’s onshore Advice Guides, supported by Advice Optimiser, leveraging nearly 900 advice strategies
  • WealthAI: Autonomous video generation for advice documents and member statements
• Implementation and compliance
  • SteveAI: Agentive orchestration layer providing file notes and guidance
  • Regulatory Advice File Audit (RAFA) for Licensees: Real-time ASIC and AFCA-aligned advice file audit, validating advice outputs pre and post implementation
  • RAFA for Super Funds & Platforms: AI-enabled assurance framework designed to support trustee oversight of advice-linked implementation, compliance evidence and governance

Mr Esler said the Portal is now in such demand from advisers that Padua expects $27 billion in active money recommendations through the advice ecosystem in FY2027, up from $17 billion in FY26.

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David Kane

As Anthropic expands into the Australian and New Zealand markets, leading Asia-Pacific data and AI consultancy V2 AI has built an enterprise-grade, intelligent AI solution, leveraging Anthropic’s Claude, that revolutionises how financial advisers engage with Allianz Retire+.

As a key Anthropic implementation partner, V2 AI is supporting a range of Australian enterprises across highly regulated industries to rapidly adopt Claude models to deliver unmatched speed, security, and scalable AI value.

The Allianz Retire+ Adviser Digital Assistant, or Ada, leverages Claude via AWS Bedrock, selected for its reasoning performance and assurance capability in regulated environments. The conversational tool transforms how financial advisers, paraplanners, and the financial services community engage with the Allianz Retire+ retirement income solution, Allianz Guaranteed Income for Life (AGILE).

From complexity to confident advice, accelerating the sales cycle

Understanding and comparing retirement solutions is time-intensive. Ada delivers contextual education precisely when and where it’s needed. It makes complex retirement income concepts more accessible, enabling self-paced exploration and empowering advisers to deliver better retirement outcomes.

David Kane, Chief Executive Officer, Allianz Retire+, said the AI assistant provides a user-centric experience built on enterprise-grade tooling with robust guardrails to ensure the highest standards of quality and accuracy.

“We’ve listened to advisers and recognised that for them to effectively solve for their clients’ retirement needs, they first need a frictionless way to master the tools at their disposal. Ada allows advisers to ask questions and receive robust answers within seconds, freeing up their time to focus on building better retirements for their clients.”

Anthropic expanding AI possibilities for Australian enterprises

Craig Howe, Founder and CEO of V2 AI, said that Anthropic presents an immense opportunity for Australian enterprises, with many V2 clients already experiencing the business benefits.

“Partnering with Anthropic at this pivotal moment allows us to bring world-class trusted AI capabilities to Australian organisations like Allianz and deliver significant business outcomes,” said Howe.

V2 AI’s experience spans the full Anthropic ecosystem, including Claude via AWS Bedrock, Claude Code, the Claude API platform and enterprise-wide adoption through Claude Teams.

In the energy sector, V2 AI is building grid-optimisation agents, automated customer billing optimisation, and anomaly detection systems to improve infrastructure resilience, customer experience, and safety. For the government, V2 is delivering agentic-based mainframe modernisation and regulatory knowledge assistants to transform public administration and improve service delivery.

These industry blueprints are designed to be repeatable, enabling rapid scale across enterprises in the region.

Scaling enterprise AI with confidence, speed, and control

V2’s experience, coupled with Anthropic’s technology capabilities, demonstrates how enterprise AI can propel businesses in regulated environments like financial services when compliance, legal, risk, product, and leadership come together. When organisational readiness meets clear AI strategy, governance and technical delivery, measurable value flows across the entire chain, from insurer to intermediary to customer.

Scaling Claude-based solutions demands a disciplined approach to responsible AI, where robust AI safety and assurance guardrails, such as evaluation with hallucination detection, human-in-the-loop escalation and regulator-ready audit trails are embedded from the outset.

V2 AI enables this through its proprietary Enterprise Velocity System, which combines AI technology with the governance, operating rhythm and delivery structures required to run an Intelligent Enterprise.

“Through our partnership with Anthropic, we aim to continue harnessing Claude to deliver consistent, high-quality solutions that help our customers not just adopt AI faster, but grow faster as a result. We believe this will establish a new standard for trusted, responsible and outcome-driven AI, supporting businesses across Australia and the broader APAC region to achieve significant business outcomes,” concluded Howe.

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Max Allan

This week, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre announced the release of the final report for Project Acacia.

The project explored how tokenised assets, digital money and modern settlement infrastructure could fundamentally reshape Australia’s wholesale financial markets.

Project Acacia has achieved world firsts, including the issuance of pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) onto public and private distributed ledger infrastructure.

20 innovative use cases from a diverse range of organisations, ranging from fintechs to major banks, completed experimentation between August 2025 and February 2026, comprising:

• 12 pilot use cases, which involved real money and real asset transactions, and
• 8 proof-of-concept use cases involving simulated transactions.

The use cases involve varied asset classes, including fixed income, managed funds, repos, structured products, private markets, carbon credits and trade payables. Settlement was conducted using a range of methods and forms of public and private digital money, such as stablecoins, tokenised forms of commercial bank deposits, pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), and traditional RBA exchange settlement account (ESA) balances.

The experiment operated in parallel with an examination of the key legal and regulatory considerations associated with the issuance of bank deposit tokens in Australia.

Project Acacia highlights the strong and growing interest across industry in the use of tokenisation within Australia’s wholesale financial markets. By streamlining processes and enabling more efficient settlement, tokenisation has the potential to deliver meaningful improvements in market efficiency, resilience and overall functionality.

Mallesons partner Max Allan sat on the Industry Advisory Group for Project Acacia, which provided advice on the project pathway, findings and future research opportunities.

Commenting on the project, Max Allan said: “This project has been a vital initiative to emphasise the opportunities created by new technology solutions to enhance the functionality, resilience, efficiency and stability of financial markets and systems, in Australia and beyond.

“As financial markets, payments and digital assets rapidly evolve, it will be important to maximise the benefits presented by these opportunities and adeptly navigate the challenges. This will require sustained constructive engagement across government, regulators, industry associations and market participants.

“I would like to congratulate the Reserve Bank of Australia, Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, ASIC, APRA, the Australian Treasury and all participants, including my colleagues on the Industry Advisory Group, for the success of the project. I am delighted, and grateful, to have had the opportunity to contribute to the project.”

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Tim Steele

Leading corporate compliance and legal document provider NowInfinity, has announced a multi-year program of enhancements to deliver greater productivity for accountants, financial advisers and legal professionals.

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Arnold says the past year has seen enormous sums being poured into technology as major tech players race to build the infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence, and investors are questioning whether that will translate into real revenue and justify the scale of spending.

“The first question is about deployment of capital. If you’ve owned stock in any AI business over the past two or three years, it’s likely you’ve done very well. But the level of capex upgrades we have seen during reporting season has been huge,” Arnold says.

“Technology giants have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to data centres, chips and computing power to build the backbone of the AI economy. But as spending rises, so too does the pressure to generate returns.

“Now, the market is starting to take a different view on how sustainable these projections really are, and what we saw toward the back end of 2025 was different companies being rewarded or punished in very different ways.

“We’ve seen a sell off across several major tech companies in recent months. As a result, investors are being punished, software companies are being punished, and the hyperscalers are being looked at very differently to how they were only twelve months ago.”

Arnold says debt is the second pressure point emerging in the sector.

“The combination of increased levels of debt and an inability to catch up on revenue expectations can become a real problem,” Arnold says.

“Share prices went up when the story around the growth potential of AI was positive. Now, as valuations have soared, we’re starting to see that optimism temper.”

The third and perhaps most important factor impacting investment is demand.

“As innovation occurs at a rapid rate, demand is becoming harder to track, but it remains the most influential factor. We spend a lot of time going through the AI tech stack asking whether demand is actually justifying the capex we see today,” Arnold says.

“Companies building AI infrastructure argue the spending is necessary because they are seeing the demand. Markets, however, are looking at these numbers and becoming more sceptical.”

Arnold says this has been most clear in software companies. The recent sell-off reflects a growing concern that some software companies may struggle to defend their business models in a world dominated by large language models.

However, Arnold believes some areas of the market will prove more resilient than others. Businesses that operate in environments where accuracy is critical, where switching systems is difficult, or where regulation creates barriers to entry are likely to maintain stronger competitive positions.

“If a company’s value is based purely on a publicly available data set, then a large language model is going to commoditise that,” Arnold says.

“Areas where there isn’t a tolerance for errors will likely be more protected.

“Similarly, companies that control proprietary data or have high switching costs embedded in their products may be better placed to defend their margins.”

As the AI investment cycle continues to accelerate, Arnold says investors will increasingly focus on these fundamentals rather than broad narratives about technological disruption.

“The market is moving beyond the excitement of the disruption theme, and for stock pickers it means there are opportunities to outperform. But it also comes with a higher level of risk,” Arnold says.

“What if AI turns out to be less ‘bubble versus boom’ and more a stress test for who can actually turn US$660 billion of capital expenditure into revenue?

“What matters now is whether the spending we’re seeing today can actually turn into sustainable revenue tomorrow.”

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Neil Younger

Licensing and business services group, Entireti is partnering with global financial technology company Communify, a leading provider of financial AI, digital and data solutions for the financial industry, to build an Australian-first digital ecosystem platform for advice businesses and their clients.

Entireti’s ERAi platform will leverage AI and automation to gather, analyse and organise data from a practice’s existing technology, including emails, financial planning software and apps, to create a secure central knowledge base of information and insights. This knowledge base will feature deterministic guardrails to ensure AI outputs are reliable, compliant and explainable.

With ERAi , insights can be delivered in text, video and other digital formats to support the creation and delivery of personal advice, and enhance client engagement. The platform will be developed in phases, with the first phase expected to be made available to the Entireti network, which includes Akumin, Fortnum, Personal Financial Services and Entireti Alliances, from Q3 2026.

Neil Younger, Group Chief Executive of Entireti, said plans to deliver an advice platform for the Intelligence Era formed part of the group’s broader “Road to 200 strategy” to help practices scale up and boost the number of clients they could efficiently serve.

“Across our community there is a shared ambition to build thriving practices that are serving more Australians and growing sustainably,” he said.

“After a comprehensive review of the market, we are excited to work with Communify to help advisers bring together structured and unstructured data from across their systems, documents and external sources to create a single source of truth.”

“This is one of the most significant technology programs for Entireti to date and will become foundational to our offering.”

“Communify is investing heavily in Australia and excited to leverage our global data platform to power insights, signals and stories for the Australian market. We are excited to partner with Entireti to achieve the road to 200 and beyond,” said Will Bailey, Chief Strategy Officer & President, APAC, of Communify.

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Inderpreet Batra

Global payments revenue is projected to grow to $2.4 trillion by 2029, according to new research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG). While growth is expected to moderate to 4% annually over the next five years, the industry is undergoing a foundational reset as agentic AI, digital currencies, and fintech business models begin to shape the next wave of expansion.

These findings come from BCG’s 23rd annual Global Payments Report, The Future Is (Anything but) Stable, released yesterday. The report draws on BCG’s proprietary Global Payments Model and includes forecasts and market dynamics across more than 60 economies accounting for more than 90% of global GDP. It identifies five structural forces reshaping the payments landscape: the rise of agentic AI, digital currencies such as stablecoins, fintech disruption, real-time account-to-account (A2A) systems, and the enduring importance of cost transformation.

“This is a turning point for the industry,” said Inderpreet Batra, BCG managing director and senior partner and global head of the firm’s payments and fintech segment. “Traditional growth levers are losing force, but new drivers including agentic systems, programmable money, and fintech innovation are rapidly coming into focus. The players that align to these shifts now will lead the next decade.”

New forces reshaping the industry

Among the key findings of the 2025 report:

• Global payments revenue reached $1.9 trillion in 2024, but future growth will slow. After growing at 8.8% annually since 2019, revenue expansion is expected to ease to 4% annually. Transaction-based revenues remain strong, while deposit margin tailwinds slacken. Looking at overall growth (transaction-related and non-transaction-related revenue combined), Latin America will lead with 7.9% projected annual growth from 2024 to 2029, followed by the Middle East and Africa at 6.8%. Revenue growth in Europe over this period is expected to be 3.5%, in line with North America (3.4%) and Asia-Pacific (3.3%).
• Agentic AI is set to influence over $1 trillion in e-commerce spending. According to BCG research, 81% of US consumers expect to use agentic AI tools to shop, which will shape more than half of all online purchases in the near future.
• Stablecoins reached $26 trillion in volume, although real-world payments account for only 1% of that total. The market remains heavily concentrated in facilitating crypto trading.
• Payments fintechs generated $176 billion in revenue in 2024, and are growing at 23% annually. Payments-focused fintechs have attracted over $135 billion in equity funding over the past 25 years and now make up 45% of total fintech revenue. The top performers are growing three times as fast as incumbents.
• Real-time A2A payment volumes rose 40% globally in 2024. These systems now account for around a quarter of digital retail payments worldwide, even exceeding 50% of transactions in selected markets like India and Brazil. In the Middle East and Africa, where real-time systems are still emerging, adoption is projected to reach more than 50% by 2030.

“We’re entering an era where growth and complexity go hand in hand,” said Markus Ampenberger, BCG managing director and partner. “The next winners in payments won’t just be fast adopters of technology. They will be the firms that deeply integrate new capabilities into business and operating models, and customer value propositions.”

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Matt Heine

FinClear, Australia’s leading independent technology and infrastructure provider for financial market access, has announced a new partnership with Netwealth, an ASX 100 company and one of Australia’s fastest growing wealth management businesses, that will enable it to offer individual HIN data and trading to investors and wealth professionals.

FinClear will provide the capability via APIs to the Netwealth platform, augmenting its current reporting and trading solution.

The Netwealth platform currently offers trading via a custodial solution but is looking to provide greater flexibility to its clients with the added option of trading and reporting on their individual holdings, which will be available either via the Netwealth platform or in conjunction with a stockbroker or wealth manager that transacts with FinClear.

The iHIN offering will streamline processes for financial advisors and stockbrokers who have clients with HIN holdings, as they will now be able to execute trades from the Netwealth platform or from their own trading screens in a quicker, more efficient and more secure manner, whilst also being able to access custodial assets, like managed funds, international equities, domestic and foreign bonds or managed account models.

Netwealth’s decision to partner with FinClear was driven by the extensive capabilities of FinClear’s market-leading API broking technology, enabling Netwealth to efficiently and cost effectively integrate with FinClear’s systems.

Commenting on the appointment, Matt Heine, CEO of Netwealth, said: “We’re excited to be adding iHIN administration and reporting for our users, as part of our mission to continuously improve efficiencies, user experiences and customer options as we expand our platform to service greater segments of the Australian wealth management industry including stockbrokers and HNW firms.

“When we set out to bring this additional offering to customers, FinClear was the clear choice of provider. We have tried and tested its proprietary tech, expertise and flexibility, and we knew it would be a straightforward and efficient process.”

David Ferrall, CEO of FinClear, said: “We are proud to continue to grow our role in the wealth space, improving financial markets infrastructure for many Australians. This offering will improve the experience for those using Netwealth’s gold standard services.

“Now end investors on the Netwealth platform have the option to hold assets directly in their own name, and financial advisors or wealth managers will have a far more efficient process for trading, administration and reporting.”

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Jeff Hall

GBST, a leading global provider of wealth management and advice solutions technology, has completed the multimillion-dollar upgrade of its Composer platform across the APAC region – the final step in a multi-year global transformation program. This milestone delivers a single, modernised platform architecture across GBST’s core markets, positioning clients for faster innovation, stronger regulatory readiness, security, and enhanced member experiences.

The upgrade modernises GBST’s core technology stack to a cloud-native, API-rich, and highly scalable architecture, designed to meet evolving client needs and embed enterprise-grade security. As the APAC clients transition to the modern platform, GBST can deliver new capabilities simultaneously across markets, accelerating time-to-value and ensuring consistency in service delivery.

The upgraded platform also deepens integration with GBST’s SuperStream Gateway, delivering straight-through ATO message processing, automated contributions and rollovers, and real-time data synchronisation to ensure funds are ready for upcoming reforms such as Payday Super.

Alongside the upgrade, GBST continues to expand Composer’s capabilities through complementary services. Software as a Service (SaaS) gives clients automatic access to the latest platform enhancements without the need for manual upgrades, reducing infrastructure costs, improving scalability, and enabling faster responses to market and regulatory changes.

Furthermore, Testing as a Service (TaaS) automates quality assurance to accelerate delivery cycles, reduce operational risk, and significantly reduce client-side testing timelines.

In parallel, GBST has achieved the first step towards SOC 2 certification and is progressing with the next level. We are committed to the highest recognised standards for data protection, privacy, and operational resilience, giving our clients confidence their information is safeguarded

Jeff Hall, Head of APAC at GBST, said: “Passing this milestone brings the full power of our modernised Composer platform to APAC clients, without disruption to their day-to-day operations. It means they can launch new products, adapt to regulatory changes, and deliver exceptional member experiences faster than ever before. The platform’s open architecture also makes it easier to integrate with both existing and emerging systems, allowing clients to seamlessly connect into a broader ecosystem of services and solutions.”

Rob DeDominicis, CEO at GBST, added: “Completing this transformation in APAC unifies our clients globally on a single, future-focused platform. It strengthens GBST’s ability to innovate at pace, expand capabilities, and deliver secure, scalable solutions that help clients stay ahead in an increasingly competitive wealth management market.”

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Roman Regelman

FNZ, the global wealth management platform, has today announced the global launch of FNZ Advisor AI, a generative AI solution embedded directly into FNZ’s market leading wealth management platform. The solution will help financial advisors enhance productivity, deliver more personalised advice and serve more clients at scale.

The modern advisor’s context

Today’s financial advisors face growing pressure to meet evolving client expectations, regulatory obligations and business growth targets, all while managing rising operational complexity.

Recent FNZ research found that 73% of wealth management clients expect more personalised services from their advisor in the next two years, while 70% of advisors believe better technology is essential to meeting those expectations.

FNZ Advisor AI addresses these challenges by integrating intelligent automation and AI-driven efficiencies directly into FNZ’s market leading platform, placing powerful capabilities right at an advisor’s fingertips.

Why FNZ Advisor AI will change the game

With more than 650 financial institution partners, over 26 million end investors and close to $2 trillion in assets on platform, FNZ provides access to one of the largest wealth management data sets in the world.

This enables FNZ Advisor AI to support smarter, faster decision-making by generating real-time insights based on client and portfolio data. Advisors can proactively identify opportunities, flag risks and tailor their recommendations across their full book of business, ultimately driving better client outcomes.

Advisor AI also automates the entire client meeting lifecycle. Advisors can now prepare for meetings using personalised insights, access relevant content during client meetings, and use Advisor AI to transcribe and analyse the discussions afterwards. The advanced solution will also highlight key points that require follow-up and guide advisors on the most relevant next conversations to have with each client.

The time spent on repetitive administrative tasks is significantly reduced, freeing up advisors to spend more time with clients and focus on delivering high-quality, personalised advice.

Security at its core

The technology is underpinned by a dedicated AI architecture, FNZ’s robust AI governance framework, and close alignment with regulators to ensure the solution meets the highest industry standards while maintaining trust and security. This is supported by an experienced team running continuous evaluations, testing prompts and outputs to verify performance.

Alongside the advanced capabilities that set Adviser AI apart from generic solutions, robust guardrails are also built in to minimise the risk of AI hallucinations and ensure accuracy.

Roman Regelman, FNZ Group President, said: “We know advisors globally are already experimenting with and relying on generative AI tools, but they are looking for integrated solutions to effectively and safely support them and their clients.”

“FNZ Advisor AI changes the game. Underpinned by rigorous testing, and embedded into our market leading advisor platform, it enables advisors to spend more time with clients and deliver more reliable, faster and more personalized advice at scale. We are already seeing strong interest across our global client base and look forward to full deployment later this year.”

This launch also follows the recent announcement of a global strategic partnership between FNZ and Microsoft, aimed at accelerating digital transformation in the wealth management industry and enhancing FNZ’s AI, automation and cloud capabilities worldwide.

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