Steve Grace: Brodie, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you on Give It A Nudge today.

Brodie Haupt: Thanks Steve, really happy to be here.

Steve Grace: Let’s start with a quick rundown on WLTH, the business, and then we’ll talk about you.

Brodie Haupt: WLTH is a lending and payments fintech with a core focus on loyalty and purpose. We came to market in January this year with our property-secured lending product, WLTH Lend. That’s a platform built through the lending with a digital application process, enabling consumers to apply for a loan completely digitally. We’ve also just launched to the wider broker market, making us one of the only challenger lenders in market that supports the broker sector.

Steve Grace: Tell me about the home loan product specifically.

Brodie Haupt: It’s about identifying the pain points that still exist in Australian lending. The first component is enabling consumers to jump online via our lending loop and have a full digital experience. You don’t need reams of papers or to chase down statements. You upload your ID, do your identity verification, log into your internet banking via the bank statements link, download all your statements, give them to us, and we can give you an approval within 48 hours. Just trying to make it simple.

Steve Grace: You run this with your brother Drew. How does that work?

Brodie Haupt: We’ve done pretty much everything together since we were kids. Primary school, composite classes, high school. After school we’d always look out for each other. If I got a job at a cafe I’d get him one, and vice versa. That carried all the way through to starting our business. The dynamic of working with your brother is that blood’s thicker than water. You can have an argument, walk out of the room, turn around, and get over it quickly. That’s different from having friends in business, which we’ve also done. For me and Drew, we’re yin and yang. Drew is down in Sydney this weekend for the SailGP as one of our sponsors, while I’m back in Brisbane running operations. It works well.

Steve Grace: How long have you been planning WLTH?

Brodie Haupt: We launched to the wider public in January this year but we’d been planning for 24 months before that. And we’ve gone down the venture capital route. We raised three million via a SAFE note earlier this year, which we closed in June. We gave investors a 30% discount with a 420% uplift triggered off the back of the Series A, which we’ve just opened about three weeks ago and will close at the end of January.

Steve Grace: Tell me about the Parley partnership because I think it’s what makes you really different.

Brodie Haupt: We’re really proud of this. When we had the idea for WLTH, we said we want purpose in the DNA of the organisation. Ocean purpose and the removal of single-use plastic was an easy choice because we were already practicing what we preached. Before the pandemic we had a rule in our office that no one would get their bonus if they brought in single-use plastic. No keep cups with plastic lids, no Noodles takeaway containers. So we were already living it. When building WLTH, we wanted to create a card made from recycled ocean plastic and then work out who the real impact-led organisations were in the space. Parley were always number one for us. I knew Parley’s partnership with Adidas, the recycled ocean plastic shoes. That was their most successful global campaign, a billion dollars in sales with zero ad spend. I had to buy mine off StockX.

Steve Grace: So how did you actually land the partnership?

Brodie Haupt: We were speaking to card manufacturers and one of them, Joseki and Devron, mentioned they were about to partner with a new supplier. Our CEO Dave said to me, god help us if this is Parley. We’ll sign tomorrow whatever the price. Their BDM came back and said he couldn’t tell us who it was but there was a fairly good chance it could be those guys. About a month later we all jumped on a call together, told them our story, and they said yes. Every settled loan we give Parley the ability to clean up 50 square metres of Australian coastline or seabed. That’s about one US dollar per square metre. We did our first clean-up about six weeks ago up in the Great Barrier Reef. We removed discarded ghost nets, watched coral spawning, had Nat Geo film guys up there with us, a marine biologist, a shark expert. We cleaned up just over a kilometre of coastline on Whitsunday Island and pulled out 250 kilos of marine plastics in about two hours. From an inlet that looked pristine from the boat.

Steve Grace: That’s extraordinary. What’s next for WLTH?

Brodie Haupt: Our next product is WLTH Pay, a bill payments platform built to support SMEs. We merged with PaymentLogic and YakPay, a leading business payments platform out of Melbourne. They’ve done 4.4 billion dollars worth of transactions over eight years with 7,500 active businesses and 152,500 businesses paid through the platform. We’re bringing WLTH Pay to market built on their infrastructure. SMEs will be able to pay all their bills, including to non-card-accepting merchants, via credit card with 60 days interest-free. We’ll also bring our own payment gateway to compete with Stripe and PayPal, and hold it all together with a WLTH loyalty engine that acts as a points broker, letting customers transfer points into different airline and travel partner networks.

Steve Grace: Why should someone want to work at WLTH?

Brodie Haupt: First, the purpose. Every week we educate our team about the Parley partnership and how we’re making an impact. The team is really bought into that. But fundamentally it’s about culture. We want people who expect excellence. High performers who want to be part of something that means more than just their particular role.

Steve Grace: Brodie, thank you so much for coming on the show. I love what you’re building.

Brodie Haupt: Thanks Steve. I’ll just add one thing for anyone starting out or about to go into the capital raising journey: reach out. The amount of collaboration happening in Australian fintech is incredible. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and to share what you’re working on.