Hello Clever appoints Justin Grooms to drive expansion

Hello Clever has appointed Justin Grooms as President to lead the Australian payments company's international expansion.

Grooms joins the Sydney-based group from Bolt, where he was President and Chief Executive Officer. At Hello Clever, he will drive growth, expand global revenue operations, and develop what the company describes as an AI-led consumer payments experience.

The appointment comes as competition and investment intensify around real-time payments infrastructure in the United States, a market Hello Clever is targeting for growth. According to the company, the Federal Reserve's FedNow service now connects more than 1,700 financial institutions and reaches about 40% of US demand deposit accounts, while The Clearing House's RTP network handles more than 1.5 million transactions a day and reaches about 70% of those accounts.

Grooms said the expansion of the underlying payments rails had not yet been matched by consumer-facing services.

"The rails behind payments have finally matured in the US, but the experience built on top of them hasn't kept pace," said Justin Grooms, President, Hello Clever.

"Payments is one of the last big consumer experiences yet to be rebuilt for an AI-first world. The real-time infrastructure is now in place. What's missing is the intelligent layer that sits between a customer and their money, and that's the gap I came to Hello Clever to close.

"My job is to build an agent-first experience on top of that infrastructure and take it to consumers and merchants at scale, one where paying is no longer a step you stop and think about, but something that simply happens. Get that right and you don't just speed up the checkout; you change what people expect a transaction to feel like."

Career background

Before joining Hello Clever, Grooms led Bolt through a period of expansion in North America. The company said he grew Bolt's shopper network from five million to more than 85 million accounts and oversaw the rollout of Bolt Checkout 2.0 and Bolt ID.

It also said he developed partnerships with brands and companies including Authentic Brands Group, Deckers Brands, Revolve, Saks OFF 5th, Palantir, Klarna, and Worldpay. Earlier in his career, Grooms was Chief Revenue Officer and interim Chief Executive Officer at Leap Motion, where he led commercial operations and worked through an acquisition process that drew interest from Apple and Qualcomm.

Hello Clever was founded in 2021 by Caroline Tran and Gavin Nguyen. The business connects merchants and platforms to local payment rails and focuses on real-time payments for businesses.

Its platform also includes loyalty tools and AI-based insights. Hello Clever says the business is compliant with PCI DSS and SOC standards.

Caroline Tran, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Hello Clever, said Grooms was the right executive to lead the company's next stage of expansion.

"We built Hello Clever to move money in real time and make it smarter at every step," said Caroline Tran, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Hello Clever.

"Justin has done the rare thing of scaling a consumer-payments network into the tens of millions, and he understands both the technology and the markets we're moving into. He shares the agent-first future we're building toward, and he knows how to turn that vision into revenue and reach.

"As we expand across the US and beyond, he's the best person to lead the company into its next phase of growth and to help us show that real-time, intelligent payments can become the global standard."

The hire follows a period of recognition for the company in the Australian fintech sector. Hello Clever said it won three awards at the Finnies, including Outstanding Fintech Leader of the Year for Tran, as well as prizes for Best Workplace Diversity and Excellence in Establishing a Global Presence.

Grooms' appointment gives Hello Clever a senior executive with direct experience in digital checkout, merchant relationships, and consumer network growth as it seeks to expand in the US payments market. He will focus on taking its transaction products to consumers and merchants at scale.