The Surry Hills founder helping Sydneysiders invest their way through a cost-of-living crunch

Dominic Ferrara launched his Sydney-based investment platform, Stackwell Financial, out of a co-working space on Crown Street in Surry Hills eighteen months ago with $2.3 million in seed funding and a single premise: that most Australians are too squeezed to invest properly, but not too squeezed to invest at all. Today, the platform has 47,000 active users across New South Wales, and Ferrara is preparing to close a Series A round he says will top $11 million by the end of August.

The timing is pointed. Property investors are deserting Melbourne in numbers not seen since the post-COVID correction, auction clearance rates in that city have slumped, and Sydney's own residential market is cooling under the weight of elevated interest rates and a state budget that did little to ease the burden on owner-occupiers. Meanwhile the Reserve Bank's cash rate, which has held at 3.85 per cent since March, continues to punish variable-rate mortgage holders who stretched themselves in 2021 and 2022. Ferrara's argument — that ordinary earners need diversified, low-barrier routes into financial assets — has gone from contrarian to conventional wisdom in roughly two years.

Filling the gap property left behind

Stackwell's model works on a round-up principle borrowed from American platforms like Acorns, but with a distinctly local flavour. Users link their everyday transaction accounts — the platform has integrations with CommBank, Westpac and Macquarie — and spare change from purchases is automatically funnelled into one of five portfolio options, ranging from a conservative fixed-income mix to a high-growth basket weighted toward ASX-listed technology stocks and a small allocation to global ETFs. The minimum round-up threshold is 50 cents. The annual management fee is 0.49 per cent, which sits below most retail managed fund products.

Ferrara pitched the idea to the fintech accelerator Stone & Chalk, which operates out of the Tech Central precinct near Central Station, in late 2024. Stone & Chalk's backing gave the startup credibility with early institutional investors and access to regulatory guidance ahead of its Australian Financial Services Licence approval, which came through in February 2025. The platform formally launched to the public on 1 March 2025.

The user base skews younger and urban. Internal data shared with The Daily Sydney shows 62 per cent of Stackwell's active users are between 24 and 38 years old, and 71 per cent live in postcodes classified as high-cost metropolitan areas — a category that sweeps in Sydney's inner west, the lower North Shore, and the eastern suburbs from Bondi to Randwick. The median user invests $34 a week through the round-up function, which compounds to roughly $1,768 a year before market returns. That is not retirement money. But for a generation that found itself locked out of Sydney property — median house price in the city still sits above $1.4 million according to CoreLogic's June 2026 figures — it is something.

The bigger picture for Sydney savers

The macro conditions Stackwell is navigating are genuinely difficult. Real wages in Australia grew by just 0.7 per cent in the twelve months to March 2026, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while CPI held at 3.2 per cent over the same period. Rental costs in Sydney's inner suburbs have risen an average of 11 per cent since mid-2024, according to Domain. The squeeze is real, and the political response — from both the Albanese government's cost-of-living relief measures and the NSW government's housing supply programs — has been slow to translate into relief households can feel at the supermarket or the rent portal.

Ferrara has quietly partnered with the Western Sydney University financial literacy program, FinSmart, to run free workshops at the Parramatta campus throughout July and August, targeting students and recent graduates. The sessions are free and cover budgeting, superannuation basics and the mechanics of low-cost investing. Fifty-eight seats filled in under three hours when bookings opened last week.

For Sydneysiders trying to make sense of a market where property feels out of reach, equities feel volatile and savings accounts still trail inflation, platforms like Stackwell represent one practical entry point. The round-up alone won't build wealth. But financial advisers and consumer advocates increasingly argue that any regular investing habit — even at $34 a week — builds the discipline and the portfolio history that matters when larger decisions eventually come. Ferrara's next move is a superannuation co-contribution tool he expects to release before Christmas. That one, he says, is where the real money is.