Ex-Bolt executive lands new post
Australian checkout company Hello Clever has tapped Justin Grooms as its next president, following his exit earlier this year from San Francisco-based Bolt Financial.
In his new role, Grooms will seek to extend the merchant services business around the world, with a particular focus on the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Sydney-based Hello Clever doesn’t have a presence in the U.S., but it has hired a half-dozen employees in the country so far, with plans to add more, Grooms said.
“We’re going to hire aggressively in the United States over the next year,” he said in an interview Monday.
Hello Clever has about 100 employees worldwide, with its biggest markets in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia, Grooms said.
The company is led by CEO Caroline Tran, who founded it in 2021 along with Gavin Nguyen, who is the chief technology officer.
So far, Hello Clever has raised about AU$15 million ($10.4 million). The company reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue last year, according to a LinkedIn post in 2025 from Tran.
Grooms, who left Bolt in May, declined to comment further on Hello Clever’s financials. Most recently, Grooms had been president at Bolt, but he also served as CEO for a period in 2024 and 2025.
Hello Clever sells its payments services to merchants, charging them on a per transaction basis as well as on a monthly basis for related analytics software services. The company taps artificial intelligence in determining which payments options to extend to consumers, with customized input from merchants.
Despite its ambitions, Hello Clever will face plenty of homegrown competitors, including Bolt and digital pioneer PayPal as well as those that have entered the market already from elsewhere, including the British player Checkout.com and the Dutch firm Adyen.
While Grooms’ purview is global, he is paying special attention to the big U.S. market, with an aim to make real-time payments more of a consumer option than it has been in the country.
Hello Clever has taken note of the fact that real-time systems in the U.S., including the Federal Reserve’s FedNow offering and The ClearingHouse’s RTP network, are still nascent. While banks have increasingly adopted those systems in recent years, they haven’t been extended to consumers on a broad basis.
“The rails behind payments have finally matured in the U.S., but the experience built on top of them hasn’t kept pace,” Grooms said in a statement.
Grooms has also been tasked with further integrating artificial intelligence into the company’s payments play.
“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,” Grooms said.
In addition, Hello Clever has plans to inject AI into its own operations over the next year, the new president said.
