Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

Real-Time Payments and Cashback: Unlocking Conversion and Loyalty with Caroline Tran from Hello Clever | #549

• Nathan Bush • Episode 549

Share episode

Today’s episode features Caroline Tran, Co-founder and CEO of Hello Clever. Caroline’s journey is as unlikely as it is inspiring. From working in media to building one of Australia’s most ambitious fintech startups, she’s turned a simple belief, people should be clever with their money, into a global payments platform. Hello Clever now offers merchants real-time settlement, cashback-driven loyalty, and AI-powered insights across more than 20 markets.

Today, we’re discussing…

  • How Caroline turned a consumer app into a global payment company
  • The lessons (and costs) of being a first mover in a new industry
  • Why real-time payments matter for merchants’ cash flow and customer experience
  • How cashback campaigns can replace discounts and drive loyalty
  • The psychology behind cashback vs discounting
  • How SMEs can plug in Hello Clever with minimal effort
  • Raising $4.5m in seed funding to build compliance and global expansion
  • Why large merchants are slower to adopt real-time payments and what change management is needed
  • Expansion into Japan and the US, and how they’re navigating local banking systems
  • The risks of fraud, scams, and returns in real-time payments: and how Hello Clever handles them
  • Caroline’s view on Gen Z’s hunger for instant gratification and how cashback feeds it

Connect with Caroline
Explore Hello Clever

SMS us to request a guest!

Support the show

Want to level up your ecommerce game? Come hang out in the Add To Cart Community. We’re talking deep dives, smart events, and real-world inspo for operators who are in it for the long haul.

Connect with Nathan Bush
Contact Add To Cart
Join the Community

Speaker 1:

We started the business because we just want people to be clever with their money. Cashback is more of gain rather than discount. It's more of a less loss, right. So what it means is that if you're an Australian merchant that's selling in the US, we can settle, we can collect in the US and settle into your Australian bank account. We enable growth under the payment staff as well through loyalty growth under the payment staff as well through loyalty. Welcome to Add to Cart. Australia's leading e-commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast-moving world of online retail. Here's your host, bushy.

Speaker 2:

Hey, it's Nathan Bush or Bushy, joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, australia. Do we have a treat for you today? Today, we have one of the hottest startups in Australia. They've raised millions in startup capital and are now expanding into the US, japan and Singapore, and they're a payments company. Joining me today is Carolyn Tran from Hello Clever. It's probably the best name for a finance company that you've ever heard of, and her mission is to help people be clever with their money. And when we talk clever with their money, we're not just talking consumers, we're talking about merchants as well.

Speaker 2:

Carolyn and the team are at the forefront of real-time payments and, as you'll hear from Carolyn today, real-time payments have gone from just being introduced a few years ago to now representing almost 10% of payments around the world. Carolyn found that there was a huge untapped opportunity in C to B real-time payments, and that's how Hello Clever came to be. But what's most interesting is that this isn't just a payments company. This is set up as a customer acquisition and growth company as well as a payments company to save you time and to make sure you get paid in real time. Through Hello Clever, merchants can offer cash back to customers, and most merchants are doing this using the fees that they would save from other payment methods. It's a really interesting concept, mixing both payments and loyalty together.

Speaker 2:

Today, carolyn gives us a quick fire lesson on what real-time payments are and the opportunity with real-time payments, how she has set up Hello Clever to help both merchants and customers be clever with their money, and gives us some tales around how she actually got into the world of finance when she was in the world of media beforehand and she seems to handle it so simply of media beforehand. And she seems to handle it so simply Thanks to Shopify and Klaviyo. Here's my conversation with Caroline Tran from Hello Clever. Caroline, welcome to Add to Cart.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for having me, Nathan. Super nice to be here.

Speaker 2:

Super great to have you here Now, hello Clever. It has to be a name that stands out in the finance sector, right? So I can't think of any other financial company with a name as fun as Hello Clever. Do you find that you stand out?

Speaker 1:

It actually is, and I do have a lot of people every single day ask me about how do you come up with a name, when does it get started? And I have to be like you know being there and tell them the story, so but it's really click. I mean, thank you so much for saying that. And yeah, we started the business because we just want people to be clever with their money and that's why the reason of the name.

Speaker 2:

Are you clever with your money?

Speaker 1:

I am. You know why? Because I'm an accountant. It has to be, like you know, financial, personal finances, or everything I can for. So, yeah, it has to be.

Speaker 2:

All right. Well, let's get into the story, because I've been following you for quite a while. You are this amazing Australian tech finance story that I've been following you and you've had your raises along the way team expansion, global expansion and I've just been like we've got to have a chat. But there's also been a part of me that's like I just can't work it out fully because you do so much right. So there's the real-time payments piece, there's the shop back piece, there's the payments piece. There's a lot there. Can you tell us? What does Hello Clever do?

Speaker 1:

Yes, so in a few sentences, hello Clever. We are a global payment company that combines instant cashback, embedded loyalty and intelligent insight into one place. So when we started Hello Clever, the only product that was launched in the market was a B2BDC payment gateway products, which leverages the real-time payment platform in Australia, which is NPP. I'm not sure you're familiar with new payment platforms.

Speaker 2:

Enough to be dangerous.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly, it's in 2021, when NPP was like taking off, you know where people in lockdown and thought digital payments was emerging.

Speaker 2:

What does NPP stand for?

Speaker 1:

New Payment Platform. It's really simple.

Speaker 2:

That's very simple. That's not what I'm expecting at all.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, literally, rba decided to call it NPP, so it's really easy to understand, right? It's literally a payment platform.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and that was introduced in 21?.

Speaker 1:

In 2018, but it took off in 2021 because of, you know, lockdown. It was, you know, really into digital payments where you can't get out. You have to be out, you know, doing payments online and stuff like that. So we were one of the first fintech that pluck and play into the new payment platform. But we thought, you know, okay, this is great. The use case was around peer-to-peer payments, so I can transfer from Caroline bank account to Nathan's bank accounts, you know, via PayID, if you're familiar with PayID as well but there isn't a use case around consumer-to-business, so an account I cannot transfer to our business, right?

Speaker 1:

We decided to took that advantage of being the first to be able to consumer-to-business payment, but we realized that people are not familiar with this new payment method. Then how are we going to, you know, encourage them to use, you know, payid at the checkout? So that's why we're thinking of a way that we can incentivize consumers to checkout with Pay ID and therefore, you know, the instant cashback value props was created. So, basically, when a customer pays with HelloClover at the checkout, you get instant cashback right away, and cashback has been proven in the market for years. Cash Reward, one of the prominent cashback platform in Australia has been around for 20 years and owned by the bank. They got millions of customers. I was a customer before as well, so we thought cashback was a really great value add for consumers to encourage them to use this new payment platform, and that's why we built the Australia First Consumer to Payment under the NPP and PayID and so you went out to solve that problem.

Speaker 2:

Why had no one else done B2C PayID before? Why were you the first ones to come in and do it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because we started HelloCver already with the consumer app, so we had a consumer app of around 10,000 users. So for you to build a C to B or consumer to business payment, you have to have consumer value props and a lot of, I guess auto fintech companies wouldn't want to do. You know a two-sided marketplace right, because I think you have to invest in the C and also invest in a B, but for us, we already started with the C, so it is a no-brainer for us to do this right? So we was really fortunate to become the first fintech that actually Janzak the NPP on paid to. So paid to is another form of NPP and it is similar to direct debit, but it is real-time. So, if you're familiar with the payment world, direct debit right now is not real-time. So, for example, if you pay for your gym membership right now, right to like any type of fitness or anything like that, yeah, the merchant won't receive real-time. Pay2 allows real-time transaction.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

So you can transact that on the MPP and it was through a RBA bank account. So it was quite fortunate and I think one of the advantages of HelloPlever is that we build products at speed. So it took us like not weeks, not months, a couple of days to do that right. So take the advantage of the first mover in the market, I would have to say.

Speaker 2:

So this sounds incredibly complicated to me, and it's just because it's not my world. Is it complicated, or did you just have to come up with the proposition?

Speaker 1:

So it was complicated to get into and speaking with the sponsoring bank, if I have to say, because banks in Australia, you know, obviously the Commonwealth, the Big Four, they are really consumer protection and retail focused banks, right, so everything about consumers.

Speaker 1:

So we have to go into the ecosystem and demonstrated our use case to allowing this particular use case for the industry to be able to roll it out. Right, and in order, before that, you have to have, I guess, licensing, robust compliance process. You have to demonstrate you have a risk mitigation as well process to make sure that there is, you know, minimal in frauds and scams, right, because you're going to think about protecting the consumer first. So, and therefore, you know, for a startup of you know just starting, you have to invest into getting into setting up your compliance department and it costs a million dollars, right, so there is a really, I guess, high barrier to entry. If you want to start a business like us, again, there is the, I guess, opportunity for you to enter it, but it would take time to do it because of these requirements and regulations, risk and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as a startup. How did you get over those barriers?

Speaker 1:

Okay, so this is, you know, getting back to it. So I have to call calls a lot of chief compliance officers like LinkedIn and DM, every single chief risk and compliance officer like me or Melbourne, because we, we had no experience back then right, so I was fortunate to be able to speak with like three or four of them and they gave me really good advice and from them, we just obviously, you know, speak to a few lawyers around the processes as well. And then, yeah, we, we were really fortunate to find an advisor who were in the industry for 20 years and be able to guide us through the whole process. And ever since, you know, we've been able to build our own compliance department. And obviously, on top of that, we did raise our seed rounds, which we announced in August 2022, of four and a half million. So obviously part of it was to build our initial team. Member of our compliance department.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Amazing and taking it forward to where we are today. How do you summarize where you're at in terms of growth? How many markets are you in? Give us a sense of the scale.

Speaker 1:

Of course. So when we started, we were thinking Australia obviously you know it's his home and we wanted to create something really meaningful for the consumers and the merchants and the SMEs in general to leverage, you know real-time payment, because it's such a great product and it has been invested billions by the banks, right. So there has been a lot of obviously you know growth during the process. But then we soon realized merchants don't just sell in Australia, right, they sell globally. Merchants don't just sell in Australia, right, they sell globally. So that's why, back in, you know, late last year, we have to then redefine our roadmap and want it to be well, I want it to serve global merchants, I want it to serve Australian merchants as well, but sell globally. So that's why we've been busy the past four months to build new products so merchants can live in 20 markets. So, as of today, merchants can go into Hello Clubber, create a merchant account with one single integration. You don't have to integrate multiple times to get into 20 markets, because the fact is that some auto payment companies, if you are a global merchant, you have to go through the API or the tech stack to integrate every single time in each different market. We simplify the whole process and make sure you can go global from day one, which is really phenomenal, right, for the merchants who you know sell globally. So it works really well with, like, travel agencies and merchants that do global. You know ticketings and stuff like that. So, and then we can help merchants settle their funds locally as well. So what it means is that if you're an Australian merchant that's selling in the US, we can settle, we can collect in the US and settle into your Australian bank account Instead of asking you need to be settled in the US, something like that. So probably a really seamless, you know, global payment solution. But merchants come to us not just because of global payments right, they can go to stripe, they can go to like any other big payment giant companies like paypal, etc.

Speaker 1:

So the key differentiations between hello clever and these players is that we enable growth under the payment staff as well through loyalty. So, whether it's instant cashback or a seamless API that you can design your loyalty flow. So, basically, replace discounts, right, so cashback, replace discount. Optimize your payment under our payment stack so you can not just save money on the payment processing costs because merchants are paying 3% to 4% at the moment. Right. So for us it is a fair price, but a premium service, at the same time enabling, I guess, top-line revenue for them as well. So it is a win-win right. So, and then, recently we launched Clara AI product, which is a, you know, a multi-agent AI which, you know, monitors and tell you proactive insights to what happened to your business, so you can make decisions in real time, not waiting for you know hours or days to know what's going on. Right? But we turned women into a growth engine, and for you to do this, you need to build payment from scratch and, as I mentioned, compliance, regulation, risk and all of that.

Speaker 2:

And you've just done that. You've just rebuilt payment from scratch, no biggie.

Speaker 1:

We did the entire foundation. So it took us like obviously a year or, more, two years to do that foundation and then, you know, now adding more and more values to the merchant. So if I get cashback platforms wanted to do something like what we do, they have to become a payment company, right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

They're not right, so they're more affiliate, so yeah.

Speaker 2:

All right, I want to come back to the loyalty and the cashback and the AI, but first I just want to make sure that I'm getting the payments piece right. You've introduced a lot of concepts so quickly for me. My brain takes a bit to catch up. So if we're talking payments, obviously the benefit for merchants is that they're getting the payment in real time.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so merchants need the capital. When the customers pay under Heliclover, the merchant receives that in their bank account in real time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and customers not paying any credit card fees or additional on top.

Speaker 1:

Exactly so. You don't pay anything, but you get cash back. Even right, that's better.

Speaker 2:

And then how it's shown in the checkout. So if we're just thinking from an e-commerce perspective, then if I'm going to shop at who's your biggest merchants, Give us some merchants.

Speaker 1:

So Aftershock, which is one of the largest commuter stores in Australia.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so if I'm going onto the Aftershock site and I'm getting all the way through to checkout and then I'm getting to payment options, are they a Shopify store?

Speaker 1:

They are a Shopify Plus store, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so if we're getting to checkout, you obviously got Shopify Pay there as an option. You open up more payment methods. Is Hello Clever one of the payment options, or is it just labeled as a real-time payment or direct debit?

Speaker 1:

So we make it flexible for merchants who decide. So we are at the moment on AfterShop. We are one of the payment options. So you would say Pay With Pay ID powered by Hello, clever, right, gotcha, and then Pay With Pay ID. You get five percent cash back, right, yes, but we are doing that. Where shop pay, there'll be like one click checkout, shop pay after pay. Obviously, buy now, pay later. So you can see the difference between that. So after shop, as soon as I buy a computer, you know like one of the pc, custom build pc, it's costly.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they're crazy, those PCs, they're mental $100 back Like literally so good, right, as a consumer, honestly, we run campaigns like that for AfterShok and like cashback went crazy, literally. So we make it flexible for merchants to invest into this because it's similar to how you invest into a marketing campaign, right, so you run you know campaign. Right, so you run use on your during, I guess, weekends, right, for two hours. Cash back 10 percent normally for someone like aftershock, because the ticket item is really really huge, like 2000 average, but I do about three percent and you get you know six dollars back right immediately.

Speaker 2:

Um so similar to the afterpay model, where they can run promotions with their group, except instead of going into debt, you're getting cash back straight away.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we don't encourage credit transaction, we're encouraging debit. So basically, you're getting your money right, you save, but you get cash back, so you get rewards for spending your money.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, all right, cool. So I've got the payment bits down pat. That all makes perfect sense Roughly in Australia. Where are we sitting in terms of real-time payments or this new payment type, compared to traditional methods such as credit cards or afterpay?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So Australia is a market where, like I have to say, like 50% of the consumers are using Apple Pay or digital wallets, right, and then the rest of them are all about debit card, credit cards. So, as of I think last year, so real-time payment was sitting at about 10%, whereas the buy-now-pay-later sector is sitting at about 4%.

Speaker 2:

Wow, it's bigger than what I thought.

Speaker 1:

Huge. It's huge, but it's obviously including all of the U cases. It's huge, it's huge, but it's obviously including all of the U cases. So basically, peer-to-peer payments, business-to-business payment, consumer-to-business payment.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

And I think it's worth. Like you know, obviously you know billions of dollars industry, so basically it is increasing. As you can see, probably if you go into Amazon right now, they are enabling return payment already. So I did it last month, I think, in partnership with NAP, so unfortunately it wasn't us, but Amazon is obviously, as you know is, one of the biggest merchants in Australia, so they did that already.

Speaker 1:

But the difference between what Amazon is doing with us is that I think you get 5% discount when you pay with NPP real-time payment instead of cash back. Now, obviously I would question that. Because discount versus cash back makes such a huge difference? Right, because we believe and this is what we see with our merchants cash back is more of gain rather than discount. It's more of a less loss, right, and you kind of devalue the brands a little bit if you're giving discounts, whereas cash back, we can create a post-purchase experience as well, and there's consumer data that are coming into your system that you can do a lot with it instead of just like, oh, just a one-off discount.

Speaker 1:

I don't know whose this is, so, yeah, so, as you probably know, cashback has been around for 20 years. The industry is growing as well. Shopback is a really great player. Industry is growing as well. Shopback is a really great player. Do about 80 million revenue a year. So that is amazing, right? So that's why we're trying to combine the entire system together. And one you know stop shop for all of what merchants need.

Speaker 2:

Yeah and the traditional payment methods. Are they trying to squash you? Because I can imagine there's a hell of a lot of revenue to protect there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah for sure. So what we're trying to do and trying to achieve here is, obviously we offer a fair pricing. I have to say it is so much better than the traditional ones. So, for example, paypal or even debit and credit cards, because real-time payments is local, right? Npp is local and it is offered by you know, the local banks, so it has been obviously removing a lot of layers already. So, basically, card payments are expensive because you've got so many parties involved and everyone want to card, whereas local payment is already introduced by the banks local banks so there's no five other parties involved, and that's why it is better price for merchants. So that's why, if you jump on real-time payment right now, it saves you a million of dollars, right? If?

Speaker 1:

you're a merchant that process 50 million. I guarantee you we save you a lot of money.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Are you speaking to a lot of merchants who don't even know this is an option. I'm just trying to think why wouldn't you have this as an option?

Speaker 1:

the merchant. So large merchants right, when you think about large merchants, I think it's just because of the change management that they have to go through. They will accept this in the next five years 100 but it's just because it's still new. So there's a lot of change management going through the system and also the legacy system that you have to deal with for large enterprise merchants. But for merchants like SMEs mid-market we build all the plug-in and free integration already into like the largest e-commerce systems. So that's why it's literally just a day job, not even like a couple of hours where you can plug and play into our payment gateway.

Speaker 2:

You make finance sound so easy.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know I do, because you know it's a way for us to make sure that you know the merchants understand the benefits of real-time payment. You get your money now instead of like when you have three to five days, so Stripe will settle your collections in like three to five days, right, whereas for us we settle instantly. And the good thing about return payment is that I need to mention, there is no chargeback, right, so it saves you a lot of time and effort and money as well.

Speaker 2:

I was literally talking to a retailer yesterday who was just they do a lot of their trade on a Saturday. They're very weekend heavy. And she was just saying, coming up to peak, she doesn't get that money back until the Wednesday or the Thursday. And she's like I know it's only four or five days, but it makes such a big difference because their stock is essentially fresh stock. So it just makes such a huge difference to her to have that cash available to her immediately.

Speaker 1:

No, definitely, you have to jump on real-time payment for sure. So yeah, so I guess because it's still news, it's only been around for 2021, since 2021, you will see the adoption of this in the near future, because there's several markets around the world has been proven this model right. So, for example, I have to give you a example of Singapore. Like, 80% of businesses in Singapore accept real-time payments. And then Europe as well has been around as well Brazil and India. So there definitely is emerging trends on real-time payment on the consumer-to-business use case. So in Australia, it's only been around for three years, so it needs time to adapt, you know. But we are fortunate to be one of the first fintechs who really builds that use case and we're just waiting for more moments for the growth to come, you know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, All right. Well, I want to talk about that growth engine being cashback and loyalty. When you talk cashback, so let's take that example that you had before I go through. I buy a PC, I'm getting $300 back on my PC. Who's funding that cashback?

Speaker 1:

The merchant we fund. That's cashback. So in HelloClover merchant dashboard there is a tool. It is called cashback campaign. What it will do is that we will let the merchants who flexibly set up a cashback campaign depends on their budget, right? So if you think about all the cashback platforms like Shopback or Cash Rewards, you have to go through another affiliate platform and it fix cashback, right.

Speaker 1:

We are dynamic. You can set up, let's say, during peak time you give, you know, 3% and during like quiet time you give 5%. So it's super dynamic and it fit into your budget as well. So let's say I have $5,000 budget because it's coming out of your marketing budget. Let's run it, you know, during the quiet time, right, and give them the most cashback or whatever you wanted to design it. So there's a product under our merchant dashboard. It's Cashback Campaign. Now we launched another product it's called Mindstone Campaign under Hello Clever. So what it means is that you're going to reward your regular, so every single time. So it's like what we visualize it as a digital coffee card. So you'll come back and purchase a PC, you know, I don't know like once a year or whatever. You get rewards further. It wouldn't apply for PC because you wouldn't do.

Speaker 2:

You come back for parts and accessories.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, accessories, and you know clothing, fashion, apparel. So I come back and purchase and I get you know rewards even more, and it's all embedded into payment, right? We cannot do this without a payment system. We give the customers cash direct.

Speaker 2:

And do you find that your merchants are advertising that cashback option further up in the journey? Or is it usually waiting until they get through to checkout to surface that? Waiting until they get through to checkout to surface that Decuba's mission is to leave the world more amazing than we found it? So what does that look like? It means prioritizing sustainable practices, empowering amazing people and sending less rubbish emails. With the help of Klaviyo, Decuba have been able to do exactly that and achieve 34% growth in revenue from Klaviyo. Decuba have been able to do exactly that and achieve 34% growth in revenue from Klaviyo Flows. With Klaviyo, Decuba has been able to confidently send more emails, knowing that they will be valuable, by responding to omni-channel behaviors and targeting at-risk and high-intensity shoppers differently and growing lookalike audiences. See, the world doesn't need less email, just needs amazing email. To explore how Klaviyo can grow your e-commerce business and to see more case studies like this, visit klaviyocom. Forward slash au.

Speaker 1:

Now. So they would. Normally, if they run a campaign like that, they will advertise it in their EDMs or on their website right During the financial year. You know we do cashback during this time and this time right, get quick and, to be honest, some of the campaigns run out in like literally 15 minutes. It's crazy, for 15 minutes we're running out $5,000. And so it means that customer is actually going to wait for that moment to purchase and it's increased the revenue for the merchants at that point and they're justifying this cash back.

Speaker 2:

Are they by reduced fees? Yeah yeah, okay, so that's the the calculation you've got to do to understand that, if I can shift customers to spend more, buy more and use real-time payments via Hello Clever, I can actually justify giving away this much cash back because I'm not losing in other fees.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So basically, because you have been saving that much of payment fees, you're using that payment fees savings to become a cash back right and then it helps you to increase your revenue. It's literally a no-brainer. That makes sense. Yeah, you to increase your revenue.

Speaker 2:

It's literally a no-brainer. That makes sense. Yeah, Tell me some of the most. What are some of the most creative examples that you've seen of integrating all this together?

Speaker 1:

So we work with merchants in especially, you know, travel sector, and for travel sector, to be honest, it's quite high risk, because what if COVID happens again? Right, so people cannot travel. So there are a few you know campaigns that we are launching with one of the, I guess, largest booking system in Asia Pacific. It's called Traveloka, I'm not sure if you know them. So we've been running a few campaigns with them and you know we see how you know payment has saved them a lot of fees, right, because they are a global business. So they sell tickets in like 50 countries and you can imagine how you can do all of the payment integration in each of every single country If you go through HelloClover, we can just do that to you right, literally Gotcha. So it saves a lot of technical efforts as well.

Speaker 1:

As you know, we can centralize everything in one place. So you are as a payment manager or like a financial manager. You can just go into our payment dashboards and have a look at which country you've gone live and who has been paying and buying which tickets, right? So it has been a really interesting use case for us. So we do find a lot of traction in high ticket items, for example computer stores, furnitures and then travel sector. Right, okay, will sell globally, yeah.

Speaker 2:

On those high ticket items. So do you find, then, that there's a segment of customer who is continually shopping for Hello, clever cashback? So if you think back to how Afterpay launched in the market, it was all about the Afterpay directory, in that Afterpay essentially put pressure on a whole bunch of retailers to say actually, we've got all your customers reaching out to us saying I wish brand A, b and C was using Afterpay, otherwise I'd shop there. But I'm not shopping there because I'm shopping with the shoe brand that's offering Afterpay, because that's how I like to shop now.

Speaker 1:

Are you getting that same kind of pressure from your customers? Yeah, in terms of the consumer side, we do have like customers reach out to us, be like because of the cash. So basically there's some you know instances where customers reach out to us and be like hang on, I don't get my cash back. What's going on? And then we have to come back to the merchants and check with them or actually the campaign has been finishing. Like you know, you're literally at the last minute of the campaign, so sorry, your transaction wasn't part of that campaign.

Speaker 1:

So people get like upset about it because they were just like hang on, I was here because you, I wanted to. You know, buy this item and I get cash back instantly. Right. So we see a lot of emerging you know use cases like that, which is really exciting and has proven our model right and sticking to our vision. We want people to be clever with their money and we want people to be clever with their money and we want us to be words for their purchasing behaviors, because a lot of transaction through our system is debit transaction. What it means is that it is your money. You wanted to purchase this item or purchase this holiday because you obviously deserve it, so you're getting rewards for it as well.

Speaker 2:

I really like your marketing around being clever with your money, like coming from a payments company to say we're here to help you be clever with your money. What kind of cut through have you had? Especially, I suppose, I'm interested in those younger generations, the Gen Zs. What kind of feedback are you getting from younger shoppers?

Speaker 1:

So they love instant replication. So there's know there's a lot of products that have been giving Gen Z instant replication and we thought rewards hasn't been instant replication at all, you know, the past 20 years. So we wanted to change that. And we cannot change that without building payment first, and that's why we took the advantage of.

Speaker 1:

You know, the whole world is building real-time payments right now. Right, so there has to be a use case for instant rewards, paying your cash back instantly into your bank accounts, right. So otherwise, you know, we were thinking about how we can make rewards instantly without payment. You cannot unless you pre-fund that cash back, which is a risk and as a business, a startup, you cannot risk that. Right, so it has to make sense and product has to make sense, and that's why, you know, we thought, you know, become a payment company is the start and that is now our moat, because we now plug and play into like 30 banks across the world. Right, so we have that moat. If you want to build that, you need license, you need compliance. We are licensed in Australia and we're looking to get licensed in the rest of the world and I'm sure they have more new cases as we go.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, what's the next global expansion? Where would you like to play?

Speaker 1:

So, interestingly, recently we opened our entity and operation in Japan. It has become a really interesting market for us. As you probably know, japanese is really risk-averse yeah, risk-averse, and it took me, like, I think, six months to a year to just create an entity in Japan. It's crazy. So recently we and I cannot announce this yet but Japan has been a really good market for us and we're looking into the US right now because FedNow, which is an equivalent payment system to NPP in Australia, launched last year. So they launched that product last year. We need to take that advantage of being one of the first. We cannot miss the boat. So we're looking to launch in the US really, really soon and Merchant in Australia can just use real-time payment in the US. Literally now, today, I can turn it on.

Speaker 2:

That's cool. I'm keen to understand from you, as an entrepreneur, first mover advantage. Obviously you've jumped on this really quickly and you've got that advantage. Are there times where first mover advantage has also kicked you in the butt?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there is, so I'll give you maybe an example. Obviously, if we are too new, we need to spend our resources to educate the market. So if you go on YouTube right now and search for how to pay with pay ID, it probably Hello Club is the first video, right? No one has done it and we did our first video to educate a consumer how to pay with pay ID. It got like thousand views on that video. So, yeah, so one of the cases where you know it's too new. Everything is like new. It takes time to educate consumers, take time to educate merchants. But I think it's also a good way, because then you know we're gonna have to create a legacy and this is something that we we're quite proud of to be first mover in australia and continue to build products that keep innovating industry right Because, for example, ai right what we can do with AI in payments and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and tell me about that AI release and the insights that you're gathering there, because I'm really keen that you would get so much data through there. There's so much compliance, there's so much risk, so many directions you can go with AI. Where did you start? Where are you putting most of your efforts?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we started, you know, bidding out a use cases for AI late last year because we thought you know. So, basically, my co-founder, gavin. So he studied AI and machine learning in RMIT, melbourne, like three years ago. So he's a PhD candidates now at RMIT. And I thought, you know, gavin, you're an expert in this, right. What are we waiting for? So, immediately, we built out our AI team.

Speaker 1:

So our AI team right now at Hello Clever is consisted of three BHDs, including Gavin. First of all, his major is in visualization, so basically how it can detect an image and translate into a business context. And Gavin's expertise is in hallucination, like need to make sure AI doesn't hallucinate at all. And Henry's major is in ham series forecasting, so how to utilise data to forecast the future. So the team sit out together and build our clever AI. Basically, it is a clever data analyst to make sure that it monitors, give you productive insights to help you to make business decisions in real time. Right, so, you are right. So payment data come to us every second. We process a million transactions, right? So we wanted to make sure these insights come into excellent insights for businesses.

Speaker 1:

So we launch free products. It's called Clear AI Forecaster, so we help you to forecast your sales and revenue. We help you forecast our cashback campaign. For example, if you invest $10,000 into a cashback campaign, what kind of return you can get and get generated to make sure there is a visualization and guarantees of results and, I guess, a play of confidence right for you as a merchant if you invest into it. And then there is Clever AI data analyst as a chatbot.

Speaker 1:

So we are launching a chatbot. It's similar to TBT style but it is based on our data. So the difference between that is it's real-time data fitting through our system. So, for example, caroline purchasing something literally right now as we speak, I will give you that data right, whereas GBT, you have to upload the data and it probably takes them to analyze because it's fit through our system. So we prompt it right away for the merchants and a couple of others that in the roadmap, for example, we're forecasting your sales. We want to forecast a bunch of other things, such as inventory levels, you know, customer segment analysis and a bunch of that. So it's really crucial for a business to understand it right. So we want to replace a business analyst in your company and just use Clever AI to do a couple of things and it is part of that payment transaction anyway, you you know. So it's very more stickiness for the emergency users that's cool.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned before around one of the challenges that you have in establishing yourself is that or what. The reason no one else has gone down that path is because you actually need to be a marketplace you need to bring, you have need to have your consumers together and you need to have your businesses. And we've seen with payment options like shop pay, for they've been able to infiltrate a lot of businesses and, through Shopify, be able to power many, but then also then bring it into one app where customers can be recommended products in a really smart way based on what they've purchased. Is there any way that you're thinking about taking the relationship between all your merchants and helping your merchants cross-sell with each other based on the data that you've got?

Speaker 1:

That's really interesting suggestions. We haven't thought about that, nathan, but maybe we're meeting the roadmap. At Alphamint, we give the control to the merchants themselves, right. So we're super merchant-focused, like whatever you need, we're going to build your, our products surrounding your growth. So, obviously, starting from payment and then, you know, embed into loyalty with cashback and then now data, right. So there's a lot of things that we potentially could do together, because we do not monetize on the consumer side.

Speaker 1:

We monetize on the merchant side, as you probably know. So you know, companies like, yeah, shop, pay paypal after pay, they monetize on the consumer side as well. We don't like yet, because at the moment, the majority of our consumers are still in australia, but we do look for opportunities to grow in the us soon and then japan. So we pick markets that we think consumers loves cash back right. So, for example, obviously emerging markets like so, it's Asia, africa, they love that as well, but it's just the amount of unbanked, you know, consumers in these markets is quite large. So there has to be different strategies. So we do love to build, you know, an ecosystem where merchants can communicate with each other and, you know, obviously, monetize and make sure there's a growth platform for them as well.

Speaker 2:

But, and you know, obviously monetize and make sure there's a growth platform for them as well, but definitely that would be something interesting for us to consider. Yeah, is it difficult when you're entering new markets because you've got multiple messages, to land on the consumer side? So obviously less payment fees because you're going direct, but then also you've got your cash back. How do you balance the two? And over the top of all of that, you've got the education piece as well. I can imagine there's a lot that you need to land straight away.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%. So we started with merchant first, always, right? So I guess 90% of our focus right now is on the merchant side. So if we want us to start in a new market, we have to again starting from building a payment rail or payment infrastructure from scratch, right? So it's not like literally just go in there and block and play with Stripe. It's not going to work like that. So we have to go through several steps to be able to build our payment route and then build out, you know, your cashback value props, your clever AI value props.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, it is one global, but in order to do that, you need a payment route. So, entering the US, for example, right, we had to be. Then, you know, obviously, hire a local lawyer, hire a local director to guide us through the whole process, to plug and play into the bank, right, so it's getting done. Now it probably takes us again. You know, I think it started the conversation earlier this year and we only just get the final, final stage, so it takes a while to do that. And then I have to then invest into engineering resources to build that out, right, so it probably takes another two months after, after we get approved and I bet it's such a slow process to get all those approvals done and then, as soon as it's done, you've got to move ultra fast yeah, ultra fast to get it done, and you're going to sell it to the merchants and then, during that process, you're going to maintain it as well.

Speaker 1:

So it's not just about get in and then you're done. Right, you have to maintain the relationship with your bank, otherwise, you know what if you know you, you do not have a proper process? What if there's a merchant who's the scam, right? So you have to make sure there is the end-to-end process to follow. And no, but it's created a lot of, you know, exciting times for us to explore into new markets, right? We found consumers in the US is quite similar to Australia. Pan also, surprisingly, also quite similar. Everyone loves cashback, right. So you see, that is a really good hook for us to start.

Speaker 2:

And then, yeah, and then obviously, you know, with a lot of data coming to us, there's a bunch of things that we're doing in the background shopify is committed to keeping their merchants at the cutting edge of innovation, and the features released in their summer 25 edition are no different, as they give brands the tools that they need to work smarter today and thrive in the future. For example, shopify's AI tool Sidekick just got a lot smarter it's able to synthesize data from multiple sources simultaneously, moving beyond basic Q&A to solve complex business challenges. They've also made scaling globally even easier. With Shopify payments, you can now manage various business entities and settle up in multiple currencies from a single store and for in-store. Pos has been redesigned, making the day-to-day experience for retail staff easier, with improved search, intuitive navigation and a more flexible card. Check out over 150 features that have been released by searching Shopify Summer 2025 Edition.

Speaker 2:

I was just thinking around risk for your model. What are the biggest risks that are there? Because I can imagine, obviously, a newish payment model with real-time payments plus cash back into bank accounts. What are the biggest risks that you have to manage?

Speaker 1:

So the risk is from fraudulent activities. You know, obviously, scams, right. So, for example, you're being attacked by a group of consumers who are purchasing something online and then, yes, so you pay with real-time payment. The merchant receives the money right away, but then they will call their bank and said I didn't buy this, I didn't, you know, I didn't do this. And the bank would then come back to us and be like what's going on? Right, because the bank is always protect consumers and we love that.

Speaker 1:

So there has to be balance and a really, I guess, prepared process to make sure that both merchants and consumers are protected, right, and that is one of the key challenges in payment industry as a whole, anyway. Or, for example, if you know maybe you know at the moment, crypto currency is really popular. There's sort of frauds around that as well, so we need to make sure that we don't serve merchants in crypto industry. But we do have a lot of merchants that you know come to us and be like oh, can you onboard? You know, cryptocurrency platforms, et cetera. We said no to them right away. So you need to kind of like identify the kind of merchants you want to work with as well in that way. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

How does it work in terms of returns and refunds? So if you're giving cash back straight into the bank accounts post-purchase and then customers go actually I'll have a refund how do you get the cash back back?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so good question. So because we are a payment company, we can just give them refunds right away, instant refund, but minus the cash back that your husband will be fair and swear.

Speaker 1:

So as in our commercial contracts, because the consumer will have to accept T&Cs and they make sure they give consent on that, and on the merchant side as well. So as of today, in Australia, actually, we are the only fintech that offer automated return for merchant, so we are on real-time payment. At the moment, everything is so manual, so the banks will send it to the payment company in an Excel file, believe it or not.

Speaker 2:

That's a big selling point in itself. We've had startups launch in Australia purely with that one proposition.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly no, we do everything automatically. So we build that ourselves and I can show you that you can speak to anyone in the real-time payment industry. So every single time if customers complain, the bank will send an Excel file to that payment industry. So every single time if customers complained, the bank would send an Excel file to that payment company and then that payment company would send an email manually to the merchant and asking why we automated the whole thing. When a merchant literally just go into the dashboard, we would send that notification to the merchant automatically and they'd just upload. It's similar to what Stripe's done, but we did that for real-time payment. So, yeah, it's funny because I just realized that now. Yeah, yeah, we did the entire things automatically for merchants.

Speaker 2:

That's very cool, caroline. What really strikes me is that you are in this brand-new world and in a really complicated part of e-commerce and I know it's broader than e-commerce, but what you do is complicated and it's global and there's a lot of legal coming to-.

Speaker 1:

High regulated industry. Exactly.

Speaker 2:

High fraud. There is so much risk involved, so much growth, but you managed to explain things so simply and so clearly for people. How do you maintain that level of balance in a world that I can imagine? You must have a thousand things on your plate at the moment, or a thousand thoughts of what's going on everywhere. How do you maintain the balance?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so basically, you know there's a lot of things going on here, right? I think it's coming from you know my background, so I wasn't in payment industry. I literally was in media before this. We organized the Mustang Girl and a bunch of that you know those shows and I decided to quit my job and we just stumbled up you know appointment payments and we thought it was really interesting. No one was solving this problem before.

Speaker 1:

So I think, because of that, it comes from a really fresh perspective. So we can, I guess, explain to our audiences with a really simple terms, right, because otherwise no one's going to understand what we're doing. Yeah, fair and square. We do a real-time payment, we give you instant cash back, we give you real-time insights done right, and it's at fair price, not at, like, you know the price that you can afford. So it is a win-win for you as a merchant.

Speaker 1:

So I guess, as well as you know, you need to have a team who are expert at payment as well. So not like, oh, we don't have a payment experience and then the rest of the team don't have payment experience. That's going to take us time to learn and adapt, right, so we do have a team who's obviously expert in the industry as well, to get us move faster, right to get us to the right direction, right to get us to speak to the right people in terms of regulation. So, and obviously for me as a co-founder and ceo, it's all about how we create a vision and how I'm going to lead with the vibe, because people need to have fun along on the journey as well. That's what I believe. Um so, and coming from media industry, I think it was really fun during my time in media and I thought you know why? Why don't we just create a fun tech, you know, in yeah, why don't I just start a global payments company?

Speaker 1:

yeah, yeah. Why don't we just do a global payment company? Actually, we started in australia first, but yeah, let's go global tomorrow. So that's what we did I love it.

Speaker 2:

All right, and surely I'm gonna pick your brains here. Surely you've done one dumb thing with money in your life. What is it?

Speaker 1:

so invested in stocks that not doing well, I think, like before, hello clever, I spent all my savings in a company that I shouldn't have done it and they went bankrupt. So I listened to some people. You know that FOMO was crazy and then actually I didn't lose money, but it just wasn't a wise investment at all. So that's what I did. So right now I do also invest into startups, which I find really exciting because I've been doing this right, so I know how hard it is to do it. I know how kind of like understand now how to decide which one to invest.

Speaker 1:

Right, so it's not a lot of money, just like a couple of thousand dollars, but want to get in there, support the founders as much as possible, because I know I am the founder and I know the journey of you know, building a startup is super painful, right, you're spending 24- 7 to make sure the system still works, so, especially in payment. Right, you don't want downtime at all. So that's why, yeah, I really like to support, like, emerging and innovative technologies around the world oh good, found anything interesting that we should share with our listeners yeah, yeah, yeah, in obviously open, ai no?

Speaker 1:

I haven't heard about them and I don't think they do I know who's open AI Look, I looked at a lot of companies at Y Combinators and Startmate. I think there's a lot of potentials there. So always look out for opportunities. I haven't actually recently invested in like any companies at all because we've been spending a lot of efforts on Hello Clever, but if I know anyone I would definitely reach out. Obviously, a lot of efforts on Hello Clever, but if I know anyone I would definitely reach out. Obviously, Lovable right, you heard about Lovable, but love support Australian startups. There's a lot out there.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome.

Speaker 1:

So good.

Speaker 2:

What does the next 12 months look like for you at Hello Clever? What are your priorities?

Speaker 1:

So our priorities right now is to double down on ARR every month. Oh my God, if we can do that, it would be awesome. So obviously, you know, keep growing the revenue. But one of the things that we really wanted to achieve is getting our Singapore license and Japanese license. That would be awesome because that is our moat right To create more moat for Hello Clever. And then establishing our presence in the US. It's really exciting. We have our country lead in the US, starting literally in two weeks.

Speaker 2:

Awesome.

Speaker 1:

I'm really looking forward to catching up with the team in New York and then, obviously you know, create more products, innovative products. No one has done it before. We're going to be the first. We have to always be the first, because first mover advantage has been giving us a lot of opportunities and we think, when I continue to do our research, what we can do better, who we're going to replace and dominate that? Yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome. Let's just leave it there and dominate that. That's a beautiful ending to our conversation. Thank you so much, caroline. I just think it's so fascinating what you're doing at Hello Clever. Not only did you give us a good little update, a good little lesson on the opportunity for real-time payments, but also thinking about how Hello Clever can play into loyalty and marketing to grow sales as well as save money. I think it's a really interesting proposition, so thank you so much for sharing that with us today.

Speaker 1:

Collins, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2:

I think you'll agree that was 45 minutes pretty well spent if you came out of that understanding more about real-time payments and what you knew going in. I certainly did so. I hope that was valuable for you. I think it's a really, really interesting business model that Caroline and the team have there at Hello Clever. I've never seen someone not since Afterpay, but Afterpay did it a bit differently combine payments and loyalty together. All right, there are three lessons that I want to share with you from that conversation.

Speaker 2:

Number one real-time payments. The opportunity around real-time payments now representing 10% of global payments obviously a lot more in the B2B world, but growing in that C2B world as well. I think if you do not have real-time payments as an option in your checkout, you're missing out, not just from a margin perspective, but also from a customer preference perspective. It's really important to have a look at what you're offering and see if that is an additional payment method that you want to offer, whether it's with Hello Clever or another provider. But customers are starting to expect it. As Caroline said, it's not overly complicated to implement. It will take some change management and if you're on an older tech stack, it may come with some complications, but if you're on a standard tech stack, it should be a pretty straightforward thing to implement.

Speaker 2:

The second thing there was I love that point when Caroline said that when she felt out of her depth on the legal ramifications around payments, she didn't go and try and sort it out herself. She went to LinkedIn and she found the best people in Melbourne and reached out to them cold and asked for help. In the end she found one of her advisors that way. I think that's a really great lesson. Whenever we come to a roadblock, it's not just to plow through and try and work it out ourselves. Go find the people that actually have done it before and can give you the shortcuts. She did this masterfully.

Speaker 2:

And number three first mover advantage. I know there are two schools of camps on this. Some people love being first mover advantage, some people love to be fast followers. Caroline has shown with Hello Clever the advantage of getting in there first because she's built a marketplace and a moat around that. First mover advantage because she was able to demonstrate the value on both sides of that marketplace really quickly. You can see there, in a world of payments and finance that typically moves pretty slowly, caroline knows exactly when to hit the gas and when to get that momentum, and I think that's really helped with her first mover advantage.

Speaker 2:

If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend, or perhaps share it with another merchant who you think could use a little bit of real-time payments upskilling. And if you haven't already hit that subscribe button in your favorite podcast player so we can keep bringing you stories and tips to help you grow in e-commerce, if you haven't already. We have an amazing community of over 500 e-commerce professionals. It's a learning community. It's free. Come and join us. Head on over to communityadddicardcomau. Join us there and continue the conversation. See you next time. Thanks again for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to cart.