Brought to you by BULLS N’ BEARS
Murray Ward
Whilst most traditional wealth management fund managers spend their time hunting for high-net-worth whales in the deep blue of the financial sector, ASX-listed micro-investing disruptor Raiz Invest is busy building a highly lucrative empire on a completely different premise.
The company is sweeping up the loose change left on the kitchen counter, turning everyday digital pocket change into a multi-billion-dollar compounding juggernaut. If anyone in the market was still dismissive of this round-up fintech model, a spectacular financial turnaround and a high-profile leadership transition should probably put those doubts to bed once and for all.
With its financial foundations securely set in profitable territory, the Raiz board decided the time was ripe to hand the baton to a corporate heavyweight capable of scaling the business to even greater heights.
Enter fintech and digital platform heavyweight Craig Keary, who officially took the reins on June 1st as chief executive officer, succeeding outgoing boss Brendan Malone after a successful six-year tenure that steered the company through its critical early growth and ASX listing.
Keary brings significant wealth-management pedigree to the corporate table, including high-profile executive stints at Tier-1 blue-chip institutions Westpac, HSBC, and AMP Capital. Notably, he served as the chief executive officer of online broker Selfwealth, where he guided the platform through its high-stakes takeover by international digital wealth and micro-investing player Syfe.
Keary says his mandate is to streamline internal operations and roll out advanced product models, driven by a personal corporate philosophy that long-term wealth accumulation should be a quiet, automated routine running seamlessly in the background of everyday life.
The incoming hire is a firm believer that turning investing into an automatic micro-habit is as much about well-being as wealth creation. Keary advocates removing emotion from the process to help investors avoid panic-driven decisions that often prove most costly when markets turn volatile.
It is a systematic approach he views as a powerful vehicle for practical financial literacy, with a core focus on getting kids into the game early by teaching them how to save, invest and respect money through simple digital habits. The company’s encouragement of younger customers appears to be paying dividends, with Kids portfolios increasing 26.4% year on year.
The core engine driving this habit is a passive, opt-in financial assistant delivered through a slick mobile app. By hooking directly into a user’s bank card, the platform rounds up everyday purchases, such as a morning flat white or a grocery run, to the nearest dollar and funnels that spare change straight into an exchange-traded fund portfolio.
The approach is reinforced through systematic dollar-cost averaging, where money is invested at regular intervals regardless of whether markets are soaring or slumping. By automatically buying more shares when prices are low and fewer when they are high, the strategy steadily smooths the average purchase price over time, helping remove emotion from the investment process.
The macro scale of this micro-habit is already looking big, with active customer numbers hitting a hefty 347,354 users, collectively pushing the company’s funds under management to a towering $2.04 billion.
What makes this momentum particularly impressive is the broader economic backdrop, amidst persistent cost-of-living crunches and cooling retail investor sentiment, everyday Australians appear to be leaning more heavily than ever on these automated micro-investments to grow their wealth.
Importantly, the stickiness of Raiz’s users seems to have also answered the old tech sector critics, who have spent years wondering when the micro-investing model would actually translate into bottom-line profits.
As a prime example, a restructuring of the platform’s fee schedule, which took effect in August 2025, added an extra $1 to monthly maintenance fees for its Regular and Plus plans. Still, far from deterring users, the fee adjustment simply highlighted the platform’s power.
Average revenue per user climbed an impressive 14.1 per cent to $86.61, proving that customers are more than willing to pay for a service that frictionlessly automates their financial discipline.
For Raiz, that cash-printing moment has arrived with resounding clarity, setting a strong tone for the upcoming full-year results.
Statutory net profit after tax for the six months to December 2025 came in at $3.52 million, boosted by a $2.68 million deferred tax asset recognised after management determined past tax losses were likely to be recovered. Even excluding the one-off accounting benefit, the company still posted a solid underlying profit of $836,000 – a dramatic turnaround from the $1.1 million loss recorded in the previous corresponding period.
That bottom line was supercharged by a 23.9 per cent revenue spike to $14.4 million, alongside an explosive 270 per cent increase in underlying EBITDA to $2.6 million. Operating cash flow also jumped 51.4 per cent to $2.36 million, leaving the company with a robust balance sheet, including $14.6M in cash, to bankroll its next chapter of expansion.
Boosting the platform’s growth, there appears to be a growing pool of sophisticated retail users who want more than just basic index funds and Raiz is delivering exactly that through a tiered portfolio structure.
The lineup is led by the Plus plan, which is highly customisable and enables users to mix and match over 155 individual ASX-listed stocks and ETFs alongside Bitcoin and real estate. The product has already clocked up a remarkable 22.4 per cent year-on-year surge in adoption.
For alternative asset seekers, the company’s Sapphire and Property portfolios provide direct, fractionalised weightings in Bitcoin of up to five per cent and in the institutional-grade Raiz Property fund of up to 30 per cent. Meanwhile, the recently rolled-out Lite plan serves as an ultra-low-cost entry point tailored specifically for price-sensitive Gen-Z savers, with the latest numbers showing users up 86 per cent quarter on quarter.
To keep this product engine humming, the company is gearing up for a comprehensive tech refresh built on an upgraded data backbone that will roll out advanced features such as shared couple accounts, family investment goals and social gifting.
Other key initiatives scheduled for launch this year include users having direct access to US-listed equities and ASX trading, along with instant payments and faster real-time trading capabilities.
By embedding “viral loops” such as referral programs directly into the app’s user interface, Raiz aims to drive down its customer acquisition costs whilst maximising long-term customer retention.
With full-year EBITDA guidance locked into a confident range of $4.5 million to $5.5 million, a well-capitalised balance sheet and proven operator Keary now steering the day-to-day business, Raiz Invest has clearly moved past being just a clever app for tech-savvy millennials.
Instead, the company appears to have matured into an institutional-grade fintech powerhouse that has cracked the code on turning financial discipline into long-term wealth creation – and Australia’s collective spare change into a highly profitable business.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: mattbirney@bullsnbears.com.au
