What you need to know:

• CommBank's X15 venture unit has invested in another property management platform as it prepares to enter the DTC home loan market.
• The bank is building out a stable of digital assets in a major customer loyalty play, spanning loans, property, retail and energy.

CommBank is pushing into property management, taking a stake in tech platform :Different via its incubator unit X15.

Founded in 2017 by ex-Google and Uber execs Mina Radhakrishnan and her husband Ruwin Perera, the platform digitises property management and maintenance for owners investors and renters.

CommBank ultimately aims to interate :Different into the CommBank app.

Launched in early 2020, X15 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBA, with funding provided from the bank's $1 billion annual technology investment envelope, its own delivery model, and a dedicated management team.

The aim is to take stakes in adjacent services – such as energy, with its recent $20m investment in Amber – as CommBank pushes deeper into what appears to be a massive aggregated loyalty play, with potential for significant data expansion, cross selling and owned-media income.

Alongside Amber, CommBank in May made a $30m pre-launch investment in retail platform Little Birdie, effectively putting the bank in competition with the likes of Amazon, Woolworths, Ebay and Kogan.

CommBank’s ventures unit has also invested in the likes Home-In, a residential property buying tool, and Credit Savvy, designed to give user free access to their credit information, both of which will complement :Different.

It’s also planning to launch Unloan, billed as a cloud-based 10-20 minute direct-to-consumer mortgage service which will crunch customer data to provide loans under $3m for customers with higher amounts of equity.

X15 has previously invested in Vonto (a management platform for business owners), Backr (a step-by-step guide to starting a business) and venue management platform Doshii.

CommBank analytics chief Andrew McMullan last year told Mi3 that its AI-powered customer engagement engine is the powerhouse of its approach to customer-data powered personalisation at scale, getting faster and smarter via data from its 6m regular app users.

McMullan indicated the bank ultimately aims to tell customers which services they are overpaying for. 

It may be that CommBank – and its partners/incubator companies – can provide them more cheaply.