Commonwealth Bank has increased its investment in digital service development, appointing venture capital firms Square Peg Capital and Zetta Venture Partners as strategic partners.
CBA is investing A$10 million into each of Square Peg’s and Zetta’s latest funds, with the investment to go to financing local fintechs and artificial intelligence companies.
CBA’s own venture fund X15 Ventures announced the launch of its fourth investment, Backr, a platform that provides entrepreneurs with a single source for setting up and managing their businesses.
X15, which was launched in February this year, also has investments in the credit score provider Credit Savvy, home buying app Home-in and business insight app Vonto.
Speaking at a tech update yesterday, CBA chief executive Matt Comyn said the investments were aimed at sourcing new digital services for the bank’s customers.
Comyn said: “Our customers are constantly looking for seamless and innovative ways to do their banking, and even more so in the current environment.”
Comyn said digitisation was central to the bank’s planning. While the bank will maintain multi-channel distribution, the use of electronic services has increased during the pandemic and Comyn expects some of that shift to be permanent.
“Earlier this year we sent 130,000 Keycards to people who use our branches. Twenty-five per cent of those customers have taken them up,” he said.
Half a million CBA customers have downloaded the NetBank app over the past six months. The bank claims 7.5 million digitally active customers.
The bank’s online broker CommSec has signed up 400,000 new accounts so far this year.
A year ago CommSec launched Pocket, which allows investors to invest as little as A$50 a time in a range of exchange traded funds. It has attracted 100,000 accounts in 12 months.
The bank’s buy now pay later partner Klarna has had 270,000 downloads since its launch in January and is available through 81 merchants.
Comyn said the bank’s goal was to make online and mobile services more personal, with the addition of features such as bill alerts, a budgeting tool and benefits finder, which has had 2.3 million users.
Square Peg Capital’s investments include global funds transfer company Airwallex, online home lender Athena, digital wealth company Doctor Anywhere and consumer lender FinAccel and small business lender Prospa.
Zetta is a specialist investor in artificial intelligence, an area that CBA is keen to develop in its own business.