A Costa Mesa personal finance company is growing by all metrics, making strides to become among the top fintech companies in Orange County, joining the likes of Irvine-based Acorns Advisers LLC.
Happy Money, launched a decade ago under the name Payoff to help consumers pay off credit card debt and improve financial literacy, still has a ways to go before it reaches nearly $1 billion valuation achieved by Acorns, but it’s sure trying.
The company and its 200-plus employees—a figure it is looking to grow with nearly three dozen open positions for its OC offices—are moving into a bigger home at Tustin’s Flight office campus where it will take up 72,000 square feet.
That’s almost three times what it uses now in its current headquarters at the Pacific Arts Plaza in Costa Mesa, and is the largest deal to be inked thus far at the just-opened Flight creative office development.
Payoff Change
The company was founded in 2009 by Scott Saunders, who previously worked at the Small Business Administration and at the Walz Group LLC, which was eventually sold to LenderLive.
Saunders is “on a mission to defeat Sad Money,” according to his LinkedIn page.
The company’s name doubles as the company’s mission statement.
“It’s the best way to explain what we’re doing and where we’re going,” he said in a 2017 press release. “Everything we do starts with people and understanding their unique psychology.”
We co-develop products and experiences with people, meeting them where they are to help maximize their happiness along the way.”
The company changed its Payoff name to Happy Money in 2017, which has two core product lines.
Its main product retains the name Payoff, where the company basically consolidates the higher interest rate loans of credit cards into loans backed by credit unions.
Happy Money has been partnering with credit unions for these loans, including Alliant Credit Union, First Tech Federal Credit Union and Technology Credit Union. As of last year, Happy Money had deployed over $250 million of credit union capital for loans.
The Joy of Saving
Recently, the company announced a personal finance app, Joy, which is similar to Mint, which is owned by Intuit Inc. One of the eight board directors is Donna Wells, a former chief marketing officer at Mint and who is currently on the board of Betterment, an AI-driven wealth management firm.
At a time when balancing a checkbook is a thing of the past and mobile banking trumps all, personal finance apps reign supreme.
Its app wants to “help people rethink the way they spend and save money,” and offers a free, FDIC-insured Joy Savings Account.
To try to differentiate its product from the rest, Happy Money touts a “holistic approach” to financial health by combining psychology and technology to better understand spending patterns and behaviors.
The app has two main functions: rating transactions on how it made you feel with a happy face or a sad face, and prompting users to save an amount of money calculated by the app’s algorithm, called a Daily Save. The company believes it is the only financial company with this approach.
In addition to financial services and technology professionals, Happy Money said it employs clinical psychologists and neuroscientists.
“Joy puts happiness at the epicenter of spending, and for millennials, happiness is the bottom line,” Joy’s Scientific Advisor Elizabeth Dunn, Ph.D., said in a statement.
Dunn is also the author of “Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending,” and has done TED talks on the topic.
“Joy provides an alternative approach to looking at how you spend,” Dunn said.
The company’s eight-person board includes Joe Saunders, a former chief executive of Visa—and no relation to Scott Saunders—and Brian Kass, managing director of CMFG Ventures LLC, the venture capital arm of Madison, Wis.-based CUNA Mutual Group that provides insurance products to U.S. credit unions.
Five Funding Rounds
Happy Money has had five rounds of funding since 2010, generating a total $71.6 million, according to data from Crunchbase.
Seed rounds in 2010 and 2012 brought in $5.8 million total; followed by a $7 million Series A round in 2013.
Its most recent funding was its largest, bringing in $46.8 million in a 2016 Series C round.
The company currently takes up 20,064 square feet at 3200 Park Center Drive. It will move out in September and begin its new lease at Flight, taking up half of a 145,417-square-foot building.
The company is on a hiring push with 30-plus job openings in OC, including an assortment of tech and marketing positions.
Chon Kantikovit from the local office of Cushman and Wakefield negotiated the lease on behalf of Happy Money, which declined to comment on its growth plans. Parke Miller, executive vice president at Lincoln Property Co., the developer of Flight, said Happy Money is “the ideal partner to join our creative office campus and we look forward to working closely with the entire team.”
Two other tenants are reported to have signed leases at the 470,000-square-foot office development along Barranca Parkway, which launched in March.
Work Well Win, a Greenwich, Conn.-based coworking firm whose only West Coast site is now in Santa Monica, will take up 25,000 square feet, and Costa Mesa-based Branded Online will take up 20,432 square feet.
