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Podcast

Solving Housing Affordability – James Bowe, OwnHome.

August 5, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Dexter Cousins is joined by James Bowe, CEO and co-founder of OwnHome to discuss the urgent challenges of housing access and affordability in Australia.

About Ownhome

James shares how OwnHome aims to innovate the home buying journey by funding deposits and providing advocacy support to aspiring homeowners. Up for discussion is the importance of credit risk management, and the need for innovative business models in the current economic landscape.

Dexter also chats to James about his leadership journey and the successes of OwnHome, building a culture centred on resilience and a growth mindset and hiring talent with “batteries included”

Key Insights From James Bowe

  • Housing access is a pressing social challenge in Australia.
  • Young Australians face a decade-long struggle to save for a deposit.
  • OwnHome funds deposits to help families buy homes sooner.
  • The property market requires more than just financial support; confidence is key.
  • Lenders mortgage insurance is a significant profit pool for banks.
  • Credit risk assessment should consider more than just deposit size.

Find out more – https://ownhome.com/

The Fixing Housing Affordability series.

James was one of eight founders in Fintech Chatter’s 2025 series on housing affordability. Read about all eight and play every episode.

Links from this episode.

More on housing affordability on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders for a bit of a chat. Today’s guest is James Bowe, the CEO and co-founder of OwnHome. James, welcome to the show.

James Bowe
Great to be here, Dexter. Thanks for having me.

Dexter Cousins
So, your Fintech Chatter debut. We’ve been talking about doing this for a little while. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about OwnHome and the big problem that you solve?

James Bowe
Yeah. And Dexter, it was great to see the shout out and appeal for businesses that were really focused on what we see as one of the most urgent social challenges in Australia, which is the challenge of housing access, the challenge of housing affordability. And so at OwnHome, we’re rebuilding the home buying journey from the ground up. Starting with the people that are locked out of it entirely.

So the big problem that we’re focused on solving is the challenge of housing access. And so the reality for younger Australians today is that it takes them more than a decade to save up that 20% deposit. And what they’re finding is that the goalposts are constantly moving on that journey. And the reality is if you don’t have access to intergenerational wealth or family support, the system today is really rigged against you.

And so our solution is a really straightforward one, but it’s also incredibly powerful. And that’s a solution where we fund the deposit that banks would typically ask for in order for you to access the lowest possible rates and avoid costly lenders mortgage insurance. And so what we unlock for families is the ability to own a home today rather than a decade or longer in the future. We empower you to have access to the lowest possible rates and we arm you with a buyer agent to support you on that home purchase journey.

And so, that last aspect of the advocacy support that we provide to all of our customers was really born out of an observation. As we were focused on that deposit challenge, we discovered that most Australians don’t just need support with overcoming the deposit hurdle, they also need support in having the confidence to act and transact. And so, what we’ve seen is that families are crying out for help, not just with that deposit, but with the reality of navigating that property market. How to interpret a price guide, what to buy, where to compromise. And so, that’s been a really exciting expansion of our vision.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. So, how did the idea for OwnHome come about?

James Bowe
Well, the genesis for the idea in and of itself is not necessarily earth-shattering. I think it’s a problem that my generation finds itself thinking about almost on a daily basis, maybe more than virtually any other. How can I possibly achieve some semblance of financial security? And so for myself and Tim, my co-founder, we found ourselves sort of constantly circling this problem of housing affordability and housing access.

And I’d say, with a healthy amount of naivety, felt that this was something that was actually in our circle of competence. That was first and foremost a financial and legal structuring problem. And one that it looked like there were a bunch of incumbent profit pools that weren’t necessarily incentivised to focus on solving that challenge of housing access. And so we set about thinking long and hard about how can we apply our minds to that financial and legal structuring problem and set to work on building OwnHome.

Dexter Cousins
Despite fintech being around for the last 10 years, the problem’s got worse. It’s not got better. What do you think kind of now you’re kind of seeing with things like product and innovation around product or process and system or legislation that the things that need to be innovated on to actually solve the problem?

James Bowe
It’s a really good point. I mean the deposit hurdle has been a challenge for many many decades and there’s been a whole host of solutions that have come in waves. One of those was actually the government back in 1965 starting effectively the lenders mortgage insurance market. And so that was a public offering. It was only privatised actually in the 90s into what became Genworth. And so oftentimes in some of these enormous social challenges, the government has been one of the first movers into this space.

I think we’ve seen over the last decade that this challenge has become more urgent. And we’ve seen that it’s attracted the attention of all levels of government. But it’s also attracted encouragingly a lot of private investment into this problem space. I think we saw just most recently an election that was really built around or focused on the challenge of housing access and housing affordability and there’s been a host of sort of solutions that are going to be coming to market including the expansion of the first home buyer guarantee scheme.

I would add I think it’s a no-brainer that we should demand of the government more on the supply side. And as we look at some of the supply challenges when it comes to housing, there’s a lot that the government can do there to unlock and encourage supply, not just the demand side. But here at OwnHome, we’re focused on supporting people in having access to housing, but we know that that’s only structurally effective so long as there’s equivalents on the supply side.

Dexter Cousins
So I noticed you use the word access rather than affordable. I guess one of my questions was going to be every time the government does seem to intervene, it increases prices even further and kind of makes it less affordable. I know we’re kind of talking semantics here but I think it’s really important. How do we switch the conversation from this thing of affordability which if you’re on the housing market or if you own a home you’re thinking well hang on that means I’ve got to lose equity in my home to make it affordable for everybody else. What do you think the conversation needs to be to get everybody engaged and kind of unified on hey this is the problem that we’re actually trying to solve versus everybody going off in different directions.

James Bowe
Well I think both of those challenges, and I do think of them as distinct challenges, the challenge of accessibility and the challenge of affordability are enormous and pressing. I think some of the solutions that try to solve both at the same time with a silver bullet can become incredibly complicated. And so I think some of the government shared equity programs are I guess focused on affordability. In the sense that it’s not adding necessarily to monthly repayments and it’s expanding the amount that an individual might be able to purchase.

But it can become quite complicated because now you’ve got the government owning a part of your property and I think we saw some of those policies being made up on the fly of like what if I renovate my kitchen, they’re like easy, we’ll just value the kitchen. And I think when I speak to banks that are being asked to support those programs, they’re asking themselves, is this a proposition that we can get behind given its complicated nature for aspiring homeowners? And so I think in this space when you do try to solve both at the exact same time, things can get complicated. That said, I think there needs to be really dedicated efforts on both sides of the equation there.

Dexter Cousins
One of the other questions I wanted to run by you as well is really around the process that you’ve got around credit risk management and how you assess people. I think one of my frustrations, I’m sure you experience this as well as a business owner, is despite the fact that we could be very successful and affluent, we’re kind of not considered that when it comes to considering a mortgage.

We work in an industry where we’ve got a lot of people who are what I would describe as the kind of participants in the project economy that might charge huge day rates and go and work for 6 months at a time and earn a lot money but then go off travelling for 6 months and it’s very hard for them to show hey look I’ve got a permanent job and I’m not going to get sacked. How have you gone about the credit risk process with your loan product?

James Bowe
Well, one of the biggest myths that pervades in this country is that if you don’t contribute a 20% deposit, you’re somehow less creditworthy than someone who does contribute a 20% deposit, say, but the reality is that when 60% of successful home buyers are relying on intergenerational wealth to bridge that deposit gap, that’s not a deciding factor in whether or not you’re creditworthy in terms of your probability to default on that loan.

And the great news is that we’re not flying blind here in terms of the creditworthiness of lower deposit aspiring homeowners. We’ve got an immensely rich data set in the lenders mortgage insurance market. And then more recently with the first home buyer guarantee scheme, we actually see the performance of those on the first home buyer guarantee program outperform the broader market. So though the arrears rates are far lower than…

Dexter Cousins
I was going to ask you that actually, like how many claims are there without lenders mortgage insurance cuz to me it just seems like the biggest waste of capital going into something that we’ve seen nothing but house price increases over the last how many decades? When is there an instance whereby that lenders mortgage insurance is actually activated?

James Bowe
Yeah. I mean it’s been a long time since I think that industry has seen large claims, that maybe back in ’08 and I think those lenders mortgage insurance providers would be the first to acknowledge that even those claims were more a consequence of some individual bank policies rather than anything in particular.

If I think about profit pools in Australia and which ones are what I would describe as lazy profit pools, lenders mortgage insurance to me stands out as one of the laziest profit pools in the sense that it’s something like 5 to 10% of premiums are paid out as claims. Versus maybe a general insurer where 60% of premiums are going to be paid out for a cyclone or flood damage. So that’s 95% of those premiums are free money for the lenders insurance providers.

And so that’s why Helia, which used to be Genworth, is one of the best performing financial stocks for the last decade. It has been a free money machine for them. And so to us, as we looked at whether or not this was a ripe opportunity here, the presence of that lazy profit pool stood out to us as one where the incumbent wasn’t necessarily incentivised to radically solve this challenge. And it meant that there was an opportunity to build a fantastic business with really sound unit economics that was still a far better proposition for aspiring homeowners.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What have you found I guess just generally within the industry has been the kind of collective consciousness around solving, because there’s a lot of nuance to all of the problems around kind of being, coming up with innovative solutions, and how receptive have you found kind of government and regulators to wanting to actually solve the problem and recognise that hey lenders mortgage insurance is a lazy, yeah, kind of form of capital.

James Bowe
My sense is that the capital return for lenders mortgage insurance providers is largely solving for systemic risk on the part of banks and it’s incredibly important to think through what’s the worst that can happen and we are a credit provider and so all that our funders care about are the downside scenarios. That’s entirely what they’re focused on and that’s also entirely what APRA is focused on when it regulates lenders mortgage insurance providers. But if what we knew to be true is that there was a different type of risk capital that could be applied to this problem. That wasn’t solving for what lenders mortgage insurance is solving for. Lenders mortgage insurance is insurance for the banks.

And so APRA is concerned and entirely focused on depositors with banks and the systemic risk of banks given that they are one of the most leveraged institutions in the economy. And so as a result, the capital requirements that they impose on LMI providers are really exorbitant, but that’s because they’re solving for the systemic risk of the banking industry. What we’re really focused on is delivering a fair and reasonable return to capital providers who are funding that deposit hurdle. And we’re actually taking systemic risk off the banks. So instead of the banks extending that aspiring homeowner 95% of the value of the property, they’re now only extending 80%.

And so just to draw that out, under lenders mortgage insurance they’ve extended 95%. If there’s a property downturn the bank has to, and they lose some money, they have to turn around and make a claim just like you would if there was a claim for flood damage to your house. And so that claim is obviously only ever as good as the insurer is and so APRA looks at the rating of the insurer versus the rating of the bank and only gives them x amount of capital protection and treatment.

For us we’re actually funding that deposit. So the bank has only funded 80% of the value of the property. So if there’s a 10% downturn, there is no claim that the bank needs to turn around and make in order to protect its capital. It hasn’t lost anything in that equation. So OwnHome is the risk capital and our funders are providing the risk capital and they’re taking it out of the banking system as a result.

Dexter Cousins
So when you’ve kind of talked me through the actual OwnHome business model, we’ve kind of got some, what I’d say are traditional models, the two-sided marketplace, for example. Essentially, there’s a two-sided marketplace where you’ve got to get funding. So you’re kind of working with the banks on one side, customers with the other, which is complex in itself, but you also got this buyers agent part of the business as well. What challenges have you found in kind of trying to bring all three components together into a kind of a homogeneous solution that you actually is going to become a profitable business?

James Bowe
Yeah. So I’d more frame it as what opportunities have we uncovered as a result of this effort? We’re really not afraid of service-based businesses in pursuit of building a really differentiated proposition. The way we think about it is we’d be far more fragile if all we were was a capital provider rather than a differentiated service provider because then we’d just be in a race to the bottom on cost of capital. And as you go through that crawl, walk, run funding journey, there are typically always players with larger balance sheets, access to lower cost of capital.

And so if you want to build a differentiated proposition as a lender, I think it’s incredibly important to deliver a differentiated experience. And for us, for both the borrowers that we work with, but now also increasingly the brokers that we work with, the differentiating experience of the OwnHome proposition is the advocacy that they receive from that embedded buyers agent who helps them on that journey. And what that’s meaning for brokers now is actually that they’re seeing the power of their clients where previously they would have played part-time therapist, property analyst, counsellor on that journey. They’re able to now.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So just a little bit about the history of the business, where you started, kind of how many people you were, where you’ve got to now, some of the successes that you’ve had.

James Bowe
Awesome. So OwnHome was founded in 2021. Now we’re a team of 40. We’re on the cusp of hitting profitability, which is incredibly exciting.

Dexter Cousins
That is exciting. It is really exciting.

James Bowe
Thanks, Dexter. And we’re now, in terms of some of the more recent successes, we’ve just recently partnered with some of the largest aggregators in the country. So, LMG, Finsure, Connective, and we’ve got an exciting partnership coming up with Aussie and Lendi that will be shortly announced. And we’re 100% focused now on supporting brokers in transforming their own business as a result of some of those distribution partnerships. And another really exciting sort of successful venture is the launch of our own dedicated buyers agency which is Peach Property and is now becoming one of the most decorated buyers agents in the country which is super exciting.

Dexter Cousins
It’s kind of an industry that’s got a bit of a reputation not dissimilar to the recruitment industry where anybody can kind of participate in it and if you got a TikTok account you’re kind of a buyer agent. What are some of the things that you’re doing differently to actually kind of give people a high value experience?

James Bowe
Yeah. Well, one of the most exciting things about this business of the buyers agent is that if I think through what are the benefits that accrue to scale here, they’re really clear and compelling on the buyers agent side of things. What that means is things like we’re able to invest more than anyone into the data that we bring to bear on behalf of our clients. And I think we’re seeing some of the most scale buyers agents in the country, including Aussie and Lendi making similar investments on behalf of the clients that they work with.

And as I think about even versus say a mortgage broking proposition versus a buyer agency, say, a mortgage broker sometimes, the single man operation can get access to the same rates as say a 5,000 person organisation. But in contrast, a single person buyers agent might only have access to the real estate agents that they work with in the couple of suburbs around them. They might not have access to the best data in the country. Whereas in contrast, you can really invest at scale in those things that are really important to aspiring homeowners. And we’re starting to see the benefits really accruing as a result of that investment.

Dexter Cousins
So, James, I wanted to kind of shift the conversation a little bit onto your journey and what you’ve been through as a founder. Before we do that, what was your background before you started OwnHome?

James Bowe
Yeah. Well, going way back, I grew up on the Central Coast, so between Sydney and Newcastle. I was really fortunate out of high school to get a full scholarship to college at Sydney University. And from there actually stumbled into consulting thanks to a chance encounter with Toby Norton-Smith from X15 who came back to college for I think a novelty debate. And so I actually have him to thank for both steering me in that direction that was incredibly formative for my early career and then also Toby to thank for helping support the vision of OwnHome when X15 invested back in 2021.

I spent most of my early career in San Francisco with Bain working with our venture and growth clients. And so I was really fortunate to be surrounded by the energy of the innovation of that city but also some of the most capable and successful investors in the world, helping them think through the opportunities that were in front of them. So that was an incredibly formative experience. I had through university studied law but never practised it. And so I’d say coupled with consulting had this sort of healthy naivety of being able to bush lawyer our way through this opportunity that we saw to both be really thoughtful capital allocators but navigate the sort of financial regulatory landscape that was required to bring OwnHome to life.

Dexter Cousins
What was the biggest shock for you kind of moving from that consulting environment into a startup?

James Bowe
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I don’t necessarily know if there’s a shock factor versus the boiled frog experience of just that the meetings will continue until morale improves in terms of the daily stresses of navigating building something from a pitch deck into something that’s supporting…

Dexter Cousins
How did you kind of move through that initial kind of, the analogy I like to use is if you look at a rocket taking off, right? The energy is focused in that one area and you’ve got to kind of keep it that way to get out of orbit. Whereas it seems to me that a lot of businesses and a lot of early stage businesses kind of dissipate that energy trying to be everywhere all at once and kind of never get out of orbit. So what was kind of for you that recognition point that the early kind of buzz and energy was starting to fade and I was like man this is much harder than I thought.

James Bowe
I’d say Tim and I were incredibly pragmatic and focused on the journey and we knew that the highs were never necessarily as high as they felt and the lows were never as bad as they might have felt in the moment. And I’d say we each help each other keep a fairly even keel. And that co-founder dynamic is incredibly powerful.

Dexter Cousins
What’s Tim’s background?

James Bowe
Tim’s background was investment banking at Macquarie, and then fintech running the Middle East for TransferWise, which is a global payments company.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And so I guess that with both neither of you being kind of tech founders, what were the challenges that you had from that side of things? Obviously kind of strategy, operations, capital very strong natural skill sets coming from you both but on the tech side perhaps not. How did you bridge that gap?

James Bowe
Well there is that saying that the team you build is the company you build. And as a fledgling startup, you do have to find talent that others are either overlooking or can’t fully appreciate. And so our now CTO joined us I feel like straight out of university but had been working during university at Macquarie and Westpac and has to be one of the most formidable technical minds that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. And it’s been amazing to see the engineering team that he has built around him.

And for us that’s starting to take us into an entirely different direction and set of opportunities as a business where other lenders are actually now starting to ask us what would it look like if we could license the platform that OwnHome has to power it.

Dexter Cousins
So kind of like white label type solutions.

James Bowe
Yeah. And that’s more a consequence of the serendipity of finding one incredible technical leader who has built a phenomenal team around…

Dexter Cousins
It’s a great example because I’ve been trying for this last decade to really shift the thinking of founders around hiring and recruitment to be more of a professional sports team than what they’ve ever accustomed in the corporate world. If I give some examples, we’ve seen the Moneyball movie. There are Premier League clubs in the UK that, they’ve got teams of data analysts that literally just scour the world and find these special talents who they buy for a few million pounds and sell for £100 million. That’s kind of I think a good example.

But the challenge still becomes as founders, how do you recognise within somebody that potential? You and I’ve kind of, whenever I’ve asked the question, it’s usually gut feel or kind of what I’ve worked with them before. What were the qualities that you were looking for in those kind of formative team members that you look back and go right kind of this now has to be the benchmark or the kind of criteria that we set when we’re looking to bring people into those kind of mission critical positions.

James Bowe
I’d say I’m like any founder where I do not have 100% success rate in nailing it out of the gate on the talent that we recruit. But it feels like we have a team that is 100% successful for the culture that we’ve built. And that requires thoughtful coaching along the journey, not just that initial talent spotting so to speak, but in terms of the talent spotting and identification of what’s the signals of excellence that we look for, certainly one is batteries included. That’s a question that I’m constantly asking myself as I’m speaking with people is, is this someone who comes with batteries included or am I going to have to be the one that’s providing the energy?

And I think for myself now I’m incredibly lucky to be surrounded by a team that all come with batteries included and that’s incredibly energising and really nourishing. And so that’s certainly one, does this person have batteries included? Two would be a bias to action. And that can be hard to detect in a interview context, but it typically in my experience reveals itself pretty early on in someone’s journey.

And so I think things as straightforward as bringing people in for a 3-day work test is, for our engineering team, an incredibly effective way to understand does this person have the bias to action that is really critical in a small team. We’re not a 40,000 person bank. There’s real ownership that comes with every single role here at OwnHome. And as a result, it’s going to be incumbent on you to have that bias to action to sort of move the needle every single day.

Certainly low ego, but still incredibly high standards. So being really proud of the work that you deliver, but not necessarily crowing about it from the rooftops. And then I think we’ve already talked about it but resilience. One of the books that we give to everyone who joins OwnHome is Antifragile and we think about that in the context of both the business model that we’re building but also in terms of the team that we’re building because as you would expect it’s not always up and to the right. And so it’s really important to find people that, we’re doing really hard problems.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And that kind of resilience with a growth mindset piece is I guess essentially the concept of antifragile, right, that kind of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right, that not just makes you stronger but you’re able to flourish in those times where everything looks dark and grim.

James Bowe
Yeah, I think it’s a really, I mean you mentioned growth mindset, Carol Dweck’s growth mindset I think is a fantastic book that I’d recommend to anyone and one of the sort of main takeaways of that book is am I someone who is at cause or am I someone who is at effect, things happen to me, or do I have agency and I’m actually able to impact the world around me.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I think it’s critical now that you look at what’s happening in the world and particularly with AI. To me, it really does kind of signal the challenge that founders have and that you’re actually, it’s not so much that there’s a talent short market. It’s just the mindset that you’re looking for and that you require is only prevalent in 10% of the population, right? The workforce, the other 90% have this kind of social contract where I’ll do just enough so that you don’t sack me and you’re going to pay me just enough so that I don’t leave and that kind of works in a corporate environment but it doesn’t work in this type of environment.

James Bowe
Yeah. I think part of the challenge there on that 90/10 split is that that 90% of people find themselves in an environment that’s not conducive to them feeling like the 10% who are absolutely relishing the work that they do every single day. And I think there’s far too few mission-oriented businesses in Australia that are scaling up. And it’s a small founder community in Australia, but it’s an incredibly generous one. And my sense of all of the founders that I have the pleasure of interacting with in Australia is that they are overwhelmingly mission-oriented. And I hope that they continue to thrive and flourish so that more of the workforce has the opportunity to experience how impactful are…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I think the challenge is kind of with that mission comes, what’s it called in Spider-Man? With power comes great responsibility, right? And I think with a mission comes great accountability. And I think that’s what a lot of people kind of tend not to sign up for is, hey, yeah, I want to, the purpose, but that purpose comes with sacrifice and accountability. And I think that’s where there’s perhaps a challenge not just here in Australia but I think just kind of generally that yeah trying to kind of fix everything whether it be your personal life, your work life balance and all of those things, that’s kind of not, to my experience anyway, it’s not how it works, right?

I’ve just had to try and figure it out and sometimes I have to sacrifice the family and sometimes I have to sacrifice the business and sometimes I have to sacrifice my wealth, right? And that’s just the nature of trying to get to an objective. It’s a bit like climbing Everest. It’s not a linear path and a ladder or you get the helicopter to the summit. You’re kind of traversing up and down and across to try and get to the goal.

James Bowe
Yeah, I agree. I think we all wish there were more businesses being started in Australia that were tackling hard problems. And it does feel rare the profile of person who’s really up for the ups and downs of that business building venture, like you yourself have embarked on that.

Dexter Cousins
Kind of when I’m talking about I’m thinking yeah they’re probably the sane ones. In terms of the culture that you’re building here, you kind of getting to that point, 40 people, usually when you get to 50 to 70 is where the growing pains start to happen. Have you kind of started to see any change in that kind of earlier phase of the business where you’re thinking hey this is starting to feel different now and perhaps we need different types of people for this next phase of the journey and this next growth?

James Bowe
It’s a good observation. I think the breadth of role that we are now looking for is broader and the backgrounds and experience that we’re looking for is more varied. One thing that we’re all as a leadership trying to be really mindful of is that we’re still being really thoughtful about identifying the signals of excellence and the spikes of the values that we really care about. It’s just that they will likely show up in different form versus our own experience. So as we sort of look to grow our sales team, what are the signals and spikes of excellence that we should be looking for?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And then I guess as a leader yourself, right, you kind of, it’s hard to remember 50 names, 60, 70 gets harder, 100 gets even harder. How do you then filter down kind of the spirit and kind of the culture itself so that it lives by itself rather than it’s kind of determined by you and you kind of enforcing it.

James Bowe
Yeah. I mean one of those elements is that concept of sort of batteries included again. And so if every single person can be sort of a flag bearer or a torchbearer for the culture, then that makes my life a lot easier. And I think we’re really fortunate to have that kind of self-reinforcing culture. Every single person at OwnHome is a part owner of the business and the ownership that I see everyone bring to bear is enormous and immense and it does feel, I’d share that we’re very non-hierarchical in the sense that we embrace the concept of sort of a super individual contributor. There aren’t middle managers who are just managing people. You’re first and foremost accountable for individually driving results. You’ll likely work with some other people in pursuit of those ambitions but the accountability is really high across the board.

Dexter Cousins
So James, you’ve been in the fintech industry now coming on 5 years. What are your observations of where we’re at now and what do you think we can be doing differently?

James Bowe
Yeah, I think as an industry for fintech we’re at a moment of real clarity, maybe even maturity in fintech. I think the hype cycle is behind us. I think the easy capital’s gone. I think what’s left is businesses that are solving real problems with a differentiated proposition. And so ones that have really strong unit economics, they’ve got great customer love and are either profitable or have a really clear path to profitability. I think for founders in the fintech space, I think that can be a real gift in that you’re forced to focus. You’re forced to make real trade-offs and because I think what’s clear is you can’t raise your way out of a broken model.

And so encouragingly it was only this week that I think Ramp in the US is raising at a 21 bill valuation, like 30% up from a year ago. And so I think sometimes there can be a lot of lore around the best days of fintech are behind us but we only have to look here in Australia and see the phenomenal success of Airwallex, one of our most successful current private businesses in the country. That said, there’s a massive amount that’s rapidly changing.

I think there’s a lot in the credit and lending space. I think there’s a lot of businesses that were built around the idea that efficiency was derived from hiring offshore talent. And I think that’s either getting swept away or about to get swept away as sort of the tide recedes and that tide probably being driven by this AI wave that we’re in and this agentic era that we’re now living through.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, it’s interesting if you look at the kind of where the funding is happening as well, certainly here on ours it’s going to those I think businesses that are solving big complex problems and I agree, I think the kind of that first phase of fintech not just the hype cycle but I think that where the model was regulatory arbitrage or fee arbitrage, those opportunities kind of go pretty quickly and you then have to focus on what I’d say is real innovation, right? How do you innovate on the product, right, still despite making it faster and a little bit more efficient it’s the same loan product that I could have got 70 years ago.

How do we evolve that and I think this is kind of really where businesses like OwnHome are really coming into their own, if you excuse the pun, that there’s now this, this is kind of the price to entry or the ticket to entry is you got to solve something that’s big and complex that can’t be done by just AI or can’t be done by an offshore team and that the kind of, it’s not an arbitrage opportunity. It’s actually an innovation opportunity.

Challenge though, as for kind of founders like yourself is that Australian investors kind of tend to shy away from innovation and want to see just returns pretty quickly, which I think is, to me I think is one of the things that really fascinates me about your business model is that the buyers agent piece I can see as being almost like a traditional services model that you can quickly, low capital, high return, comes with risk. But it’s something that you can very quickly get cash in the door. Whereas a lending business, it kind of takes years to really truly understand whether the loan product, the product itself is working or not.

And so I think that kind of innovation around how do we bring different business models and bringing them together and have kind of revenue streams that will come from that I think is a really, to me, smart move particularly given the challenges that founders face here in Australia and I think we have to look at Australia not being the US, right, so we can’t take the blueprint from there and apply it to here. There are things that we can take but I think we have kind of mix and match and create our own kind of business models that work in this environment with the resources that we have.

James Bowe
I think that’s right. I mean in my experience we do have really visionary capital providers, I think of our largest shareholder Square Peg. Paul Bassat, one of the most successful founders in the country, the DNA of that.

Dexter Cousins
I think the challenge though for them is that just fintech is a hard place for a VC to play because of the regulatory capital that typically has to go into that, not investment capital but just sitting on your balance sheet for a loan book. It’s really difficult to kind of, for their model to kind of play in that space.

James Bowe
I think that’s right, for us that part of our journey is how do we make sure that we are incredibly, and I think this is true for any Australian success story, overwhelmingly Australian success stories are very capital efficient. Think of Canva and the total capital raised. It’s not your Uber or your Snapchat that just has 15 years of deep negative cash flows. And I think that can be a real blessing. It forces you to think differently about the capital that you have raised and how do you make that go incredibly far in service of what should be a really bold and grand vision. But that negative J curve I think for many Australian businesses is a lot shallower.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And look, I agree with you and I think what it does is it creates in Australia, I think our culture is one of entrepreneurship. We’ve got 2.5 million businesses, or business owners I should say, in Australia. That’s 10% of the population, not 10% of the workforce, 10% of our population is a business owner, whether that be a small business or medium-sized business or a startup founder. So I think within that DNA what we do have is a natural talent pool of people who will go out and solve problems for profit which I think kind of lends itself to what you’ve said about the capital models as well.

We’re coming to a wrap. Before we do, where can people find out a bit more about OwnHome?

James Bowe
Yeah, they can find out more about OwnHome at ownhome.com. They can find out more about our buyers agent at peachproperty.com.au. And they can reach out to me.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome, James. It’s been fantastic to have you on the show.

James Bowe
Thanks, Dexter. Wonderful to join you.

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