In July, the Biza team attended the World Credit Union Conference at the iconic Sydney ICC for three days of in-depth discussions and learning on the state of customer-owned banking around the world.
On Day 2, Nicky Hutley, the Chief Economic Advisor at COBA, presented on the global forces shaping Australia’s economic future. Unsurprisingly, Nicky’s talk focused on the accelerating volatility and uncertainty across the world’s economies.
The world is always changing, but as Nicky pointed out, some change happens faster than others. The post-industrial period has seen a marked rise in geopolitical conflict, trade tensions, climate shocks, and technological change. For most of which we’ve seen rapid developments in just the past few years alone (hello AI). The economic and climate costs of AI are forcing governments around the world to act on a new technology they don’t really understand yet.
In Australia, we’re facing decreased productivity mixed with inflation, and the resulting rate rises, and stagnant real wages are putting households under increasing strain. Nicky explained that we’re only one major economic event away from tipping our economy over the edge. Whether that’s oil rising above USD$100 a barrel, causing energy and gas prices to soar again, rising unemployment that results in home loan defaults, or house prices plummeting.
If you’re a lender, it’s in your own interest to see households stay above water, and if you’re a borrower (or future borrower), you’re increasingly looking for ways to cut spending amidst a rising cost of living. The Consumer Data Right (CDR) is actively developing use cases to address these challenges.
Put simply, the CDR gives consumers the right to securely share their own banking and energy data with accredited parties they choose and trust.
During the WCUC, Max Diamond, Biza.io’s Head of Growth, spoke to many mutual banks about the value of using CDR data to power real-life comparisons, and the example he used was Automised.
Automised Energy is an independent Australian energy plan-matching service that uses the CDR, with Biza acting as the CDR Representative, to pull a household's actual electricity usage directly from their retailer to compare and select a plan that best suits them, and put real cash back in their pocket
The concept goes well beyond just mutual banks; the CDR can help any organisation engage their customers and their staff. A high-value, no-cost-to-customer benefit, delivered via the CDR, can deliver tangible relief at exactly the moment customers need it most.
However, it’s not just mutuals benefiting. Here, we can learn something from The City of Newcastle's "cheaper, greener electricity" initiative. The City sponsored access to the energy-matching tool for its community, delivering tangible value with minimal overhead. This means a subscription becomes a named, visible benefit to your customer, or your staff.
By offering the tools enabled by the CDR, organisations can:
If the CDR can already do this for energy data, what could your in-house engineering teams build with the same data foundation?
In a time where households across the country are attempting to navigate the effects of an uncertain economy, a rapidly changing technology environment, and the threat of climate change, businesses can leverage the CDR to ease some of the burdens these challenges create whilst building loyalty and trust.