The former Bolt president joins the Australian real-time payments company to drive global growth and build the first truly AI-powered, agent-first consumer-payments experience.
Global real-time payments company, Hello Clever, today announced the appointment of Justin Grooms as President. Grooms joins with a mandate to drive growth, scale the company’s global revenue operations and build a world-class, agent-first organisation.
Grooms will lead Hello Clever’s push to transform the foundational infrastructure of global payments and redefine how consumers interact with transactions. He will build out the industry’s first genuinely AI-powered consumer-payments interface, and set a new standard for checkout and transaction velocity.
The appointment comes as the United States builds out its real-time payment (RTP) infrastructure at speed.
The Federal Reserve’s FedNow service, launched in 2023, now connects more than 1,700 financial institutions and reaches roughly 40% of US demand deposit accounts, while The Clearing House’s longer-running RTP network says it handles more than 1.5 million transactions a day in 2026, and reaches about 70% of those accounts.
“The rails behind payments have finally matured in the US, but the experience built on top of them hasn’t kept pace,”
President of Hello Clever, Justin Grooms said.
“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.”
Grooms joins from Bolt, the US one-click checkout company, where he served as President and CEO, leading the business through a critical growth phase. During his tenure he scaled Bolt’s North American shopper network from five million to more than 85 million accounts, pioneered the rollout of Bolt Checkout 2.0 and Bolt ID, and drove enterprise partnerships with major brands including Authentic Brands Group, Deckers Brands, Revolve, Saks OFF 5th, Palantir, Klarna and Worldpay.
Earlier, as Chief Revenue Officer and interim CEO of Leap Motion – the pioneering spatial-computing company – Grooms directed global commercial operations and guided the business through a high-stakes M&A process that drew competing acquisition interest from Apple and Qualcomm. He secured multi-year strategic integrations with Meta, Google and Microsoft.
Hello Clever CEO and co-founder Caroline Tran welcomed the appointment.
“We built Hello Clever to move money in real time and make it smarter at every step,”
Caroline Tran said.
“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 news follows a standout year for Hello Clever at the 2026 Finnies, FinTech Australia’s flagship industry awards, where the company took home three prizes – the most of any business this year – including Outstanding Fintech Leader of the Year for CEO and co-founder Caroline Tran, alongside wins for Best Workplace Diversity and Excellence in Establishing a Global Presence.
About Hello Clever
Hello Clever is a Sydney-based fintech building real-time payment infrastructure for businesses. Founded in 2021 by Caroline Tran and Gavin Nguyen, the company connects merchants and platforms directly to local payment rails so money moves instantly, settles cleanly, and is easier to track. Its platform combines real-time payments, built-in loyalty and AI-powered insights, and is PCI DSS and SOC compliant. Hello Clever’s mission is to turn payments from a cost centre into an engine for growth.
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