What you need to know:

• OwnHome latest fintech to join Commbank's ranks.
• Platform aims to solve deposit challenge for first time buyers, buying the house for them, enabling them to save deposit and then buy it at agreed price with low capped inflation rate.
• CommBank building out walled garden of services that plug into its app, unlocking data, consent and commercial opportunities outside of banking.

Bank deposit

CommBank has invested in a start-up aiming to bridge the growing affordability gap between wages and property values, savings and the sums required by first time buyers to put down a deposit.

Its X15 Ventures unit has taken a minority stake in rent-to-own platform OwnHome, which helps those that can afford mortgage payments – but can’t get a big enough deposit together.

OwnHome buys the house on behalf of pre-approved credit-worthy customers who pay a 1.5 per cent starter fee, and then another 1 per cent on completion. Then they can move in – but must put aside 2.5 per cent of the property’s value every year in monthly payments, which accrues as a purchase offset.

After three to seven years, customers can buy the house using the purchase offset towards it, at a pre-agreed price, with inflation capped at 3.8 per cent a year.

Platform play

Launched to channel CommBank's billion dollar tech funding envelope in early 2020, X15 has since built, acquired or invested in 11 tech ventures – from retail marketplaces, energy retail, property management through to fintechs and venue management platforms – and there’s more to follow. “We’re just getting started,” Managing Director Toby Norton-Smith told Mi3 late last year.

The plan is to plug those businesses into the bank and its circa 15m consumer and business customers – to build what is looking like a major loyalty platform, or walled garden of services that customers will likely need to use, while giving the bank permission to promote new services and feed their data into its decision-making.

“Banks are trusted centres where people store a lot of their sensitive data, permissions and authentication. A banking app is a great environment to introduce new services to customers in a way that is entirely permissioned by them,” per Norton-Smith.

“And with many of our ventures, where customers grant permission, [we can] set them up quite easily within the app by authenticating and transferring relevant data like their email address or phone number across. That is the opportunity we are exploring.”

Digital home proposition, Unloan – which promises mortgages to low risk customers in minutes – is expected to be the next X15-backed venture out of the blocks.