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.

The post V2 AI and Anthropic power an AI assistant for Allianz Retire+ appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Many retirees can afford a comfortable retirement – yet hesitate to spend, delay decisions or default to caution.

New research from Allianz Retire+ has identified decision inertia, driven by a powerful fear of commitments perceived as irreversible, as an emerging risk to retirement outcomes for otherwise well-prepared Australians.

Many retirees can afford a comfortable retirement – yet hesitate to spend, delay decisions or default to caution, according to a new white paper released by Allianz Retire+.

The behavioural cost of this inaction is clear across the Australian retirement system. Around 700,000 retirees leave their superannuation in accumulation after retiring, costing individuals up to $136,000, while around half of account-based pension holders withdraw only the minimum required, leading many to live more cautiously than their savings actually demand.

While many financial risks can be managed through diversification and portfolio construction, longevity risk remains fundamentally different. It cannot be diversified away within an individual retirement portfolio.

When retirees lack protection against the risk of outliving their savings, advisers are forced to manage longevity as a probability rather than a certainty, a reality that often drives underspending, heightened caution and lower confidence in retirement.

David Kane, Chief Executive Officer, Allianz Retire+, said advisers face a unique challenge when it comes to longevity risk.

“Longevity is the one major retirement risk advisers can’t meaningfully diversify away. While markets can be modelled and managed over time, traditional asset allocation strategies can’t insure against the risk of outliving your savings.

“Guaranteed lifetime income is not a product preference, it is a structural planning tool that helps advisers discharge their duty of care by securing essential income for life, and in doing so, gives clients the confidence to enjoy the years they can without fearing the years they can’t.”

The paper ‘The two-chapter retirement’ brings together a wide body of evidence spanning behavioural research, Australian and global retirement studies, economic data and adviser practice insights to explain this persistent disconnect. The paper synthesises this evidence into a single, coherent framework that reflects, generally, how retirees may actually think, feel and make decisions.

The ‘Two-Chapter Retirement’ framework highlights how many people experience their retirement journey as two psychologically distinct phases:

• an active, aspirational early chapter they can clearly imagine; and
• a later, more uncertain chapter associated with caution, fear and complexity.

Mr Kane added: “What we see is not the result of financial illiteracy or inadequate savings. These are clients who are well resourced and understand their position and yet are still reluctant to act.

“The constraint is behavioural, and no amount of additional information or projections are likely to help. Instead, advisers need a fresh approach which reframes levels of commitment and stresses the exit ramps in any retirement income strategy.

“The retirement system is getting more complicated, and many people aren’t aware of products that can give them guaranteed income. Combined with natural hesitation about large financial decisions, this is leaving many retirees unclear on their spending capacity and holding them back from plans that could help them enjoy the retirement they’ve worked hard for.”

These same patterns have played out consistently across decades of experience for Allianz in the United States at greater scale. In a 2024 survey by the Allianz Centre for the Future of Retirement, 85% of respondents said they find it easier to spend when they know their basic needs are covered, with 68% saying that the fear of unexpected expenses prevents them from wanting to spend money.

The white paper outlines the benefits of guaranteed income solutions, and the positive impacts for retirees when their advisers include these products as an option in their planning discussions.

“New-era retirement income solutions offer flexible access to capital and growth with downside protection not seen in older-style annuities.” Mr Kane said.

“Advisers who can help their clients distinguish between what is genuinely irreversible and what merely feels that way will materially shift their clients’ willingness to act, and will ultimately improve both their clients’ financial and emotional security.”

The ‘Two-Chapter Retirement’ framework represents a new paradigm for retirement planning. Recognising this two-chapter mindset is essential because it shapes how clients respond to advice, perceive risk and evaluate strategies from the outset. Viewing retirement planning through this lens allows advisers to better support their clients as they balance the desire to live well today with the need to secure tomorrow.

The post Hesitancy emerging as a greater risk than market volatility, inadequate savings appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Ada significantly reduces the adviser and paraplanner learning curve and product analysis process.

Allianz Retire+ launched a market leading Al powered assistant to transform how advisers engage with its retirement income solution, Allianz Guaranteed Income for Life (AGILE), empowering them to deliver better retirements for their clients.

What advisers have told us is that retirement solutions can sometimes be complex and time consuming to understand and compare. To bridge the gap in product awareness and make technical details more accessible, we have partnered with V2 Al, a leading data and Al consultancy, to create a market first in building an Al tool for financial advisers, paraplanners and the financial services community.

The Adviser Digital Assistant, or Ada, is an interactive, conversational Al tool designed to help understand AGILE in a simple, engaging, and intuitive way. Moving away from time consuming and dense documentation by creating a space where advisers can build knowledge on their own terms was our goal. Ada significantly reduces the adviser and paraplanner learning curve and product analysis process, delivering contextual education precisely when and where it’s needed, shifting adviser enablement from static learning to dynamic, embedded support.

Importantly, Ada is built on enterprise-grade tooling with robust guardrails to ensure the highest standards of quality and accuracy.

David Kane, Chief Executive Officer, Allianz Retire+, said: “Ada adds another market leading differentiator to our AGILE product.

“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 will allow advisers to ask questions and receive robust answers within seconds, freeing up their time to focus on building better retirements for their clients.”

“We appreciate the important compliance obligations associated with providing financial advice and have developed Ada with these in mind. Leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Ada is built on enterprise-grade tooling with robust guardrails to maximise accuracy and quality.”

Craig Howe, Chief Executive Officer, V2 Al, said: “Through our partnership, we have developed an enterprise-grade intelligent, Al-led solution that revolutionises how Financial Advisers engage with Allianz Retire+. Built as an AWS-native Al capability, Ada leverages the power of Anthropic Claude via AWS Bedrock, ensuring robust data security, seamless functionality, a user-centric experience,
and full control over its roadmap.”

The retirement income market is becoming increasingly relevant for Australians, however the complexity of traditional documentation and supporting materials can create uncertainty. Ada addresses a critical gap in the market by offering a dynamic experience to make complex retirement income concepts more accessible for advisers and their clients.

The post Allianz Retire+ launches AI digital assistant for advisers appeared first on AdviserVoice.