Good morning. “Housing is the gateway for commerce,” says Ken Chenault. He ought to know. As chairman and CEO of American Express from 2001 to 2018, he transformed the brand from being perceived as a credit card for the elite to a closed-loop network that could help small merchants grow their business and deliver personalized offerings to consumers because it handled both sides of a transaction. “People would say American Express was a card company,” he told me earlier this week. “I would say, ‘We’re not just in the payments business. We’re a service platform, and the card is a form factor.’”
That’s what attracted Chenault, now chairman and managing director of the VC firm General Catalyst, to take an interest in Bilt and founder Ankur Jain, ultimately becoming an investor and chair of its board. Through Bilt, launched in 2019, Jain enables 5.5 million renters (and now also homeowners) to get loyalty points for processing monthly payments through its platform, expanding to integrate restaurants, retailers, car services, fitness studios, pharmacies and other vendors. With the launch of Bilt Neighborhood Concierge this morning, which Fortune exclusively covered, Bilt will let members reserve, pay, gain points and hop between different services without having to log into other apps.
Jain says the goal is to “turn the home into the hub for everything you do—and buy—around it,” likening the agentic service to being in a hotel. “We can let customers wake up and say ‘Hey, can you pay my rent for me, have eggs delivered to my apartment and make a reservation for dinner?’”
The home is a battleground of commerce that few have yet to master but many increasingly want to own. Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it’s making Alexa+ available to everyone in the U.S., a revamped version of the 11-year-old smart device that can handle multiple queries and act as an agent on your behalf to order repairs or an Uber. Earlier versions of Alexa failed to drive much purchasing, in part because it largely limited people to buying on Amazon.
Chenault’s fascination in home-based commerce goes back decades, saying he became interested in American Express in 1981 when its Warner-Amex joint venture launched a pioneering QUBE service that let people buy through their TV. “The infrastructure that powers Bilt’s platform rewards everywhere you live,” he says. “Housing is the anchor and no one has been able to establish this anchor at scale. The commerce is tied to your residence and, now that concierge connects it all, it’s frictionless. I always saw this as a neighborhood commerce platform.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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