KiwiSaver Copilot BNZ concept · Innovate AI Hackathon 2026
Aria Thompson Growth Fund · contributing 4%

Kia ora, Aria

It’s Tuesday 22 April 2025. Markets have been all over the news — here’s what it actually means for your KiwiSaver.

Demo scenario — a simulated member riding the real 2024–25 market, incl. the April tariff shock

Your balance · Growth Fund

$0.00

Unit prices to 22 April 2025 · updated daily

Copilot annotations the four moments on this chart worth understanding — tap one

    Real market shape: daily values derive from actual S&P 500 closes, 15 Apr 2024 – 22 Apr 2025, mapped to the fund’s 80/20 asset mix (diversified and partly hedged, so the fund moves at roughly half the headline index) plus Aria’s contributions.

    Why it moved

    April, explained exactly

    Most of a balance change is plain accounting. The copilot decomposes it deterministically — only the market slice ever needs an AI explanation.

    Your future

    Zoom out — then try a scenario

    Over 38 years, April is noise. The maths below is deterministic and computed live on this page — the AI explains results, it never invents them.

    Planning for

    You get the full $260.72 government contribution. You put in more than $1,042.86 a year, so you receive the maximum 25c-per-$1 top-up under the 2025 Budget rules — the one universally safe recommendation in KiwiSaver.

    Your fund

    Is Growth still right for you?

    Education, not advice — the copilot explains the trade-offs, then hands the decision to a human.

    • Time horizon — 38 years to 65. Long horizons have historically rewarded riding out dips like this month’s; recoveries have followed every major fall.
    • Your fund — about 80% growth assets. Expect a negative year roughly one in four, in exchange for higher long-run averages. April is what that trade-off feels like.
    • Goal check — retirement, or a first home? A 3-year horizon changes the volatility story completely. Try “First home in 3 years” in the planner above.

    What this copilot deliberately won’t do: tell you to switch funds. In New Zealand that’s regulated financial advice under the FMC Act — so at exactly that moment, it hands you to a person.

    For the judging panel — how this works under the hood

    The core design principle: AI narrates facts it is handed — it never invents causes and never does the maths. Balance changes are decomposed deterministically; only the market-returns slice gets AI explanation, grounded in the fund’s actual asset allocation and indexed market moves.

    ExperienceMember app
    web / BNZ app
    OrchestrationCopilot service
    AWS Lambda + API Gateway
    DeterministicCalc engine
    decomposition & projections — never the LLM
    GroundingFund + market context
    asset allocation, index moves, curated news (RAG)
    ReasoningAmazon Bedrock (Claude)
    + Guardrails: advice-boundary rules, tone, topics
    • Compliance-aware by design. The advice boundary (FMC Act) is enforced in guardrails, not vibes: fund-switch questions get education plus an adviser handoff, never a recommendation. Reducing panic switching also supports BNZ’s CoFI fair-conduct obligations.
    • Why it matters (FMA, COVID 2020): switching ran at 7× the normal monthly rate, $1.2b moved to lower-risk funds and only $121m ever moved back — and banks saw a disproportionate share. Members aged 26–35 made ~31% of lower-risk switches.
    • This demo: projections are computed live by the same deterministic engine the production system would use. Free-typed chat questions are answered by a live LLM behind a serverless proxy; the guided flows are scripted so the demo never stalls.