Ep. 115 - America’s Payments Moment: The Exchange, Not The Processor, with Hello Clever

Justin Grooms (0:00)

It is a huge hidden tax on the economy, how much money sits essentially in stasis, moving from one place to another. How do we introduce those outside outlier payment methods at the right moments in ways that could take a transaction from costing three or 4% down to 25 bips? You start stacking those, it starts to really add up. Every single day over the past month or so of being here, I am talking to someone at Hello Clever and learning something about payments and thinking like, I can't believe I've been in this space so long and had no idea that that was possible or that 100 million people transact like that on a daily basis. I think that we need to build in the FinTech space a much deeper empathy for how people transact in all segments of society. I don't think that that needs to be viewed as like just an altruistic and good thing to do. I think it's an opportunity. It's a massively underserved part of the market and the edges.

Kara Parkey (1:02)

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast. I'm Kara Parkey, and today we're joined by Justin Grooms. Nice to meet you, Justin. Thanks for joining us.

Justin Grooms (1:09)

Yeah, thanks so much for letting me be here. I appreciate it.

Kara Parkey (1:12)

New president of Hello Clever.

Justin Grooms (1:14)

Yeah. Just over one month.

Kara Parkey (1:17)

Okay.

Justin Grooms (1:17)

It's my one-month anniversary, and it has been a busy, busy time.

Kara Parkey (1:21)

I'm sure. Congratulations.

Justin Grooms (1:23)

Thank you.

Kara Parkey (1:23)

So you just recently joined. You were at Bolt prior. Maybe tell us a little bit about your career history and how you found your way into the space.

Justin Grooms (1:29)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I was at Bolt for quite a long time. I was at Bolt for over seven years. We started off with just a handful of people, actually a little bit smaller than where Hello Clever is right now, maybe a few dozen people. And over that period of time, grew up to a top of almost 1,200 people, servicing some of the largest merchants in the United States.

I got connected with Hello Clever during that time. Frankly, the founder, Carolyn, reached out to me and had been introduced to me by someone else, reached out and just wanted to sort of talk about how we could partner between the two companies. And I think as you know and we've discussed, it's like sometimes it's just those initial conversations that open up opportunities. As we got to know each other over time, we realized we had a lot in common for our view of where the market could go. And frankly, more in common than we disagreed on. And it seemed like a really good fit to sort of take it to the next step.

Kara Parkey (2:28)

That's awesome. It feels very organic. So maybe for everyone that doesn't know, who is Hello Clever and what do you guys do?

And then I know you've been brought on, I mean, specifically at this time to kind of lead the US expansion, to maybe talk about what that scope is and what that entails. Yeah.

Justin Grooms (2:42)

Hello Clever is, it's so fascinating for where we are as a company. I'm still getting used to the we and they. It's a relatively young company, it's several years old, but still relatively young, has an amazing clip of growth and especially APAC for money movement between countries and APAC and then in country money movement, like at a checkout layer, essentially, right?

Kara Parkey (3:04)

And headquarters is in Australia, right?

Justin Grooms (3:05)

Headquarters is in Sydney, offices around APAC, including Singapore, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City. There's people scattered throughout offices in various other countries and then now growing presence here in the United States with presence in San Francisco and then primarily here in New York, which is super exciting. Awesome.

Kara Parkey (3:26)

So yeah, talk about the US expansion. What are the plans for that? What's the remit for kind of what you guys are building here?

Justin Grooms (3:33)

Yeah, I think that the excitement that we have around the US expansion is that a lot of new and novel or emerging payment types here in the United States are actually very familiar in APAC. Account to account transfers, moving money across border at a checkout layer or at a consumer payments layer, rendering relevant payment types to people who might be traveling to different countries. It's very common in the APAC region where Hello Clever grew up. In the United States, we know that it is very much dominated by card payments and then maybe followed by BNPL right after that.