Leveraging Private Ecosystems to Redefine Community Banking

At COBA 2025, Biza CEO and Founder Stuart Low challenged Customer Owned Banks to look beyond regulatory requirements and imagine a new frontier: collaborative private ecosystems that unlock innovation, deepen customer engagement, and drive sustainable growth.

While the Consumer Data Right (CDR) has often been viewed through a compliance lens, its real potential lies in enabling trusted data sharing that fuels new partnerships and products. Today, around 2% of Australians are using the CDR, powering roughly 10% of mortgage applications. Yet legacy methods such as bilateral agreements and screen scraping still dominate. By embracing the CDR’s open standards, Customer Owned Banks can build the foundations for connected ecosystems that extend far beyond compliance.

Change is already underway. The New Payments Platform is redefining transactions; digital identity solutions like ConnectID and myID are streamlining verification and creating new revenue models; and data-sharing networks such as the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange are proving how collaboration can combat fraud. Even the green finance sector is innovating, as data-driven solutions like EV-linked loans blend sustainability with smart banking.

For Customer Owned Banks, years of investment in CDR-compliant infrastructure have created robust, integrated, and secure systems. As Stuart emphasised, this gives them a unique opportunity to lead, enabling fintechs and service providers to build scalable solutions across institutions, reflecting the cooperative spirit that underpins mutual banking.

By moving from compliance to collaboration, Customer Owned Banks can transform their data infrastructure into a strategic growth platform - one that redefines trust, delivers customer-centric innovation, and shapes the next era of community banking in Australia.