Raiz CEO: 10 Years - $2.1 Billion FUM and What Comes Next

When Brendan Malone brought the Acorns micro-investing concept from the US to Australia in February 2016, the idea was straightforward: break down the barriers to investing so that every Australian could get into the stock market for as little as $5. A decade on, that idea has compounded into $2.1 billion in funds under management, 340,000 active monthly users and over $5.5 billion invested in total.

Brendan joined Dexter Cousins on Fintech Chatter to mark the 10-year milestone and talk through what it actually takes to build a durable fintech in Australia.

From Acorns to Raiz: the first 10 months

The business started as a joint venture with US-based Acorns Grow. The deal was straightforward: Acorns provided the technology and Raiz built the operational and regulatory infrastructure for Australia. That meant spending the first 11 months navigating ASIC, learning the payments system and selecting infrastructure partners who would still be operating a decade later.

"You want to set up a business for sustainability," Brendan said. "We're sitting here in 2016 going, who's going to be around in 10 years to take us on that journey?"

The business launched publicly in February 2016, listed on the ASX as Raiz Invest in April 2018 and has operated under its own brand since.

The roundup innovation and $2.1 billion in small amounts

The core product is still the roundup. Link a debit or credit card, spend $6.50 on coffee, the app rounds it to $7.00 and holds the 50 cents. Once the accumulated roundups hit $5, the amount is direct debited from the linked bank account and invested in the chosen portfolio.

It is not complicated, but the compounding effect is. Raiz has paid over $230 million in dividends to customers, many of whom received a dividend for the first time through the platform. The business operates on a subscription model: $2.50 per month for the Light tier, $5.50 for Regular and $6.50 for Plus.

Southeast Asia: the right market, the wrong timing

Indonesia's 280 million population made the expansion case easy to argue. The revenue model is user-based, so scale matters. Local governments had financial inclusion mandates that aligned with Raiz's mission. The smartphone had already skipped the laptop generation.

The challenge was the market's preference for crypto over equities, the absence of an ETF market equivalent to Australia's and fragmented payment infrastructure. Brendan is candid about the lesson: "We were probably a bit too early for all that coming together."

It is the same lesson Netflix learned arriving in Australia before broadband was ready.

CDR: a decade of roundtables with no consumer outcome

Consumer Data Right has been one of the recurring frustrations of Australian fintech's first decade. Brendan's position is direct: the problem is who is being consulted. The conversations have been dominated by legal and technical stakeholders, not consumers.

"They're not talking to middle Australia, the masses," he said. Raiz put a survey in-app last year and received 66,000 responses in 48 hours. That is the type of consumer signal the CDR process has consistently lacked.

Raiz has deliberately chosen not to be a first mover on CDR implementation. The strategy is to wait for the second or third wave, once the kinks are resolved and adoption is real.

42 people, $2.1 billion: what a lean fintech looks like in 2026

Raiz runs on a team of 42, with 7.3 FTEs handling customer support. When investors ask Brendan why he cannot cut staff the way a major bank has by deploying AI, his response is that he does not have 3,000 support staff to cut. He never hired them in the first place.

The product team runs three meaningful development projects at any time: two customer-facing and one back-of-house. The internal principle is not to become an owner builder whose house is never finished. AI is embedded in the workflow, not bolted on.

"RAIZ, R-A-I-Z. AI is in our name," Brendan noted. "We've been using machine learning for years. That's how we do what we do with 42 staff."

The next 10 years: ecosystem, consolidation and endurance

Brendan's product roadmap centres on building an ecosystem that spans a customer's full financial life. Raiz Kids already serves the under-18 cohort. The vision is that a child who opens a Raiz Kids account and turns 18 migrates into the adult product and stays in that ecosystem indefinitely.

He also expects consolidation among micro-investing platforms within the next few years. His argument is that several players do different things well but none does everything well, and that consolidation would deliver a better, cheaper experience for customers.

The endurance principles he identifies in the fintechs that have survived a decade: stay close to customers, resist the bright shiny things, stick to your strategy three, five and 10 years out. Raiz has navigated the buy-now-pay-later hype, the crypto boom, the CDR promises and now AI without pivoting away from its core.

"A lot has changed," Brendan said, "but there's still a massive ramp for the next ten."

Listen to the full episode

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