CBA wants to corner the $2trn market for household electrification

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There is potentially billions of dollars of loans to customers electrifying their homes switching from coal-fired power and gas to solar and battery power.

Already a subscriber?As a world leader in the use of behavioural science to “nudge” customers to overcome emotions and make rational financial decisions, it is not surprising that Commonwealth Bank is switching the focus of its behavioural economics team to climate change.

An equally large line of lending opportunities will be available from the switch to electric vehicles and home connected EV chargers.CBA comes to household electrification with a number of advantages. It is the main financial institution for 35 per cent of Australians, it has a quarter of all mortgages sold in Australia, and it has a suite of products for financing rooftop solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and Teslas, which account for more than half the EVs sold in Australia.

This support suits Dutton’s campaign against the construction of transmission lines to large scale solar arrays in rural areas. Nudging people to do things that are in their interests is not manipulation, according to Harvard University’s Michael Hiscox,He set up the Australian government’s behavioural economics team called BETA and now teaches a class of about 700 students at Harvard.“Inherently we are set up as humans to conserve energy – we conserve physical energy, we conserve mental energy, we don’t like cognitive effort,” he told this columnist while in Sydney last week.

Hiscox, who is the founding director of the Sustainability, Transparency, Accountability Research Lab and a faculty member of the behavioral insights group at Harvard’s Centre for Public Leadership, says CBA has surveyed its customers and found 80 per cent want to take some action to address climate change.

The concessional $30,000 loans are only available to existing CBA mortgage holders, but that is still a large pool of potential customers.

 

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