How Proptech can partner with Fintech?

There are many touch points and intersections of property with finance, including tenant applications and screening, rent payments and collections, paying tradies, mortgages and credit risk … not to mention trust accounts! To discover how Proptech could partner with Fintech to take care of common pain points and leverage new horizons enabled by Open Banking and real time payments, we joined Jennifer Harrison, Vice President of Proptech Australia, Rebecca Ribeiro, Sales Executive at Zepto, and Jacob Serry, Co-Founder of Proptech LIZpay to discuss.

Below are a few questions Kyle tackled on the panel:

What challenges does Basiq solve for and how do you use technology to do that?

The core of the problem we are solving for is ‘Enabling Fintech Everywhere’ and how we are doing that is by providing consented access to customers financial data. We access this consumer data to provide a holistic and Insightful view of a customer’s financial picture to our partners. What this allows for is industries like Proptech’s to solve challenges throughout the entire property life cycle. Areas such as commercial in the trust accounting process, residential in a digital tenant experience or even being smarter with the payment experience. We have been super privileged to work with some amazing Proptech’s and have seen them gaining massive momentum and like Fintech, they are using innovative technology, powered by this financial data to solve some real challenges through the entire life cycle.

ADR and the Consumer Data Right

Earlier this year Basiq obtained the status of unrestricted Accredited Data Recipient under the Consumer Data Right (which is probably better known as “open banking” in Australia). In practical terms, what does that status mean for your customers both now and in the future?

Basiq has been providing Open Banking ‘like’ services to our customers for over 6 years. Open Banking is now a formalisation of the services we provide and is great news for us and our customers. Part of this process is Banks are required to create Open Banking APIs for platforms like us to consume the data from. What that means is our customers will have faster and more stable connectors.

There is also a new consent process with Open banking, currently users are required to enter their User Name and Password, whereas with Open Banking, it will be a User Name and a One Time Password (OTP). Helping our customers build greater trust in the onboarding process of their customers when they looking to share their financial data.

As an Accredited Data Recipient (ADR), we can provide our customers with both Open Banking data and Non-Open banking data via a single unified API. For our customers looking to consume Open banking data we will be able we will be able to take them on that journey as a sponsor and provide Open Banking data alongside our enhanced services such as Merchant Identification, Transaction Categorisation, and Consumer Insights.

Data Aggregation and its use cases in real estate

Let’s talk about a couple of use cases for your data aggregation technology in the real estate industry.  What are your favourite or best use cases?

Great question and I really do have a favourite application from my personal experience, I am a renter and I have experienced some of the challenges.
Firstly we have 3 main benefits that we focus on through the renters experience:

Making onboarding a simple, Smart Collections and having Serviceability at a glance

And we can see these through the 4 paces of an application

1. Applying for the property: Though getting consented access to the tenants financial data, we are able to get insight into not only their affordability at a glance, but insight into prior rental payments. Streamlining the tenants application process, but also reducing the time associated with reviewing a tenants application.
2. Onboarding a tenant: Here we streamline the supporting document process, by having access to the customers financial data we are able to instantly surface the tenants, Full name, BSB and account number. This is helping streamline the onboarding process for both the tenant and the agency
3. We can then look at paying a bond or getting ready to move in: Through that same access to that financial data we are now understand a customers financial picture to provide value add services such as Bond Finance, moving cost finance or BNPL type services.
4. Lastly, we talk about paying rent: We now have an understanding of customers pay cycles, so are are able in intuitively help a tenant select a payment cycle that works for them. Additionally, because we have ongoing access to that customers data, we can get even smarter with the payment process by checking a balance before we take the direct debit.

Who are some of the Proptechs you are working with at the moment and how are you helping them?

Basiq has helped over 1.5 M Australians share their financial data with services across Fintech, Proptech, crypto etc.. and what’s most exciting is we are seeing this application of Fintech appear in so many other verticals. We work with over 120 different platforms who use our data in various ways. Proptech has been really exciting for us as we have been able to work with businesses like LIZpay and Resly.

We are a partner driven business, that means we are leveraging the challenges that our customers are working to solve and ensuring that our platform can innovate to support them in solving these challenges. We have seen platforms like LIZpay provide an array of services across the renter experience, such as Instant account verification (surfacing a BSB and account number), streamlined rental applications (though Income and expense verification) and even BNPL capabilities.

We have platforms such as Techlend who are using our data to enable Buy Now, Sell Later services for Bridging finance. Allowing customers to purchase a new property without waiting for the settlement of their current property. And we are lucky enough to work with partners through Zepto in the payment space to allow those platforms to be smarter in the way they take payments or schedule payments by better understanding their income.

The future of open data and insights in Proptech

What do you see opening up in the future in the real estate industry benefiting from open data and insights?

Some roadmap items in the future that I see having an impact are definitely the integration of Telco and Utilities into the Open Banking Arena. But what excites me about this space is we are just at the start of the partnership between embedded finance and Proptech. We are seeing new Ideas and innovation popping up everyday, companies in the Proptech space play a pivotal role in customers lives. The biggest financial decision we make is where we are going to live. Wether it’s renting, buying a place to live or getting an Investment. Proptech businesses are at the forefront of this experience.

Through Basiq’s ability to provide them with ongoing consented access to the financial data, Proptech’s are able to harness this to technology to provide tailored services to their consumers. We can see what they are spending on, what bills they are paying and what their financial status looks like.

A good example of this is the idea of single unified customer journey. Through that ongoing access to their data we can help them from applying to a rental property, to the onboarding on that tenant. Once we have onboarded that customer, we can then help that customer better understand their finances, to nurture them on a journey from renting to home ownership. Once they are ready to move to home ownership, as we have the financial data we are able to help them find the right finance for their situation

Watch the recording of the Proptech panel event

Check out the full recording below of the panel event to catch up on everything Zepto and LIZpay had to say on how they’re helping shape and innovate in the Proptech industry!