What people ask us.

Maslow is a software and systems company building shared digital infrastructure for member-owned financial institutions—credit unions, cooperatives, and mutuals—worldwide. Rather than competing with these institutions, Maslow connects them, providing the shared technology, coordination standards, and governance that no single institution can build alone.

HAPPI is the shared infrastructure for the cooperative economy that Maslow builds. The two are deliberately separated: Maslow Holdings builds the infrastructure; the HAPPI Foundation holds it. Maslow is the build vehicle; HAPPI is a not-for-profit foundation that owns and stewards the result, so the network can never be captured or sold out from under its members.

You can read more about HAPPI’s structure and theory of change at thehappi.org.

Maslow is built for two beneficiaries: the member-owned institutions that join, and the network they create together. Federated institutions retain their own licences, boards, and community relationships—Maslow provides the shared layer beneath them, not a replacement for them.

Maslow Holdings Pty Ltd is an Australian company, based in Melbourne. The work is global: the infrastructure is being designed with and for member-owned financial institutions worldwide—credit unions, cooperatives, mutuals, and community development financial institutions across many jurisdictions. The founding cohort is being convened internationally, and the participation framework is built to accommodate institutions operating under different regulatory regimes.

There are around 88,000 community-owned financial institutions globally—three million cooperatives, a billion members—but each largely operates in isolation, with separate technology, compliance, capital, and messaging. That fragmentation leaves them carrying the same regulatory and cyber obligations as global commercial banks at a fraction of the scale, while competitors deploy new technology at a pace no single mutual can match.

The result is consolidation: credit union numbers fell roughly 10% globally in 2024. The missing piece isn’t a product or a marketing campaign—it’s a shared operating layer that no extractive vendor has a commercial reason to provide.

Legacy core-banking vendors profit from keeping institutions apart—their licensing models depend on lock-in, rent capture, and perpetual dependency. Their solutions are built for the business models credit unions exist to resist, and as the member-owned sector shrinks, those vendors chase the larger margins of for-profit banks. It is a missing layer of shared infrastructure that no extractive actor can provide without ceasing to be extractive.

Yes—and those attempts are instructive. CUSOs, league service bureaus, shared-service consortia, and peak-body platforms have all built pieces of this, and many do good work today. But they have stayed partial for structural reasons rather than lack of will: most are bound to a single jurisdiction or league, so the network effects stop at the border; most are funded year to year by their members, so they are perpetually under-capitalised against venture-funded vendors; and few have a neutral, capture-proof holder of the shared layer, so institutions hesitate to deepen their dependence on infrastructure a peer or a vendor could one day control.

Maslow’s design answers each of those directly: a commercial build entity that can raise capital and attract senior talent on market terms, operating from day one under a Covenant held by a not-for-profit foundation with a global mandate—and a build entity that dissolves once the work is done, leaving no one positioned to capture what was built.

Three curves are crossing. Consolidation is accelerating—credit union numbers fell roughly 10% globally in 2024, the steepest annual decline in years—so every year of delay shrinks the network that shared infrastructure could connect. The regulatory and cyber cost floor keeps rising, and it falls on member-owned institutions at a fraction of the scale of the commercial banks that carry the same obligations. And the cost of building software has fallen dramatically: modern engineering makes a shared, world-class layer feasible at a fraction of what it would have cost even five years ago, while widening the experience gap for any institution that has to face the technology shift alone.

The option to connect the sector is open now. Consolidation is how it closes.

Infrastructure, not products. The system has four layers: a shared interface institutions can deploy without dismantling what they have; interoperability standards so they can plug in without bespoke integration; shared financial utilities—pooled liquidity, shared risk frameworks, and capital products beyond any single institution’s reach; and a governance architecture that keeps power distributed and prevents capture by any one actor.

No. The design principle is “light global, heavy local.” The shared interface layer is built to deploy on top of existing infrastructure rather than rip and replace it, and the interoperability standards mean each new institution lowers the cost of joining for the next—without rebuilding from scratch.

Each institution that joins adds value for every other one: shared standards lower integration costs, and the collective balance sheet grows—pooling liquidity and risk in ways no member could achieve alone. Crucially, institutions join without fear of lock-in, because the governance is embedded rather than bolted on. That is what makes participation the rational choice rather than a leap of faith.

The institution does—and that doesn’t change. Member relationships, and the data associated with them, remain with the institution. Maslow takes no ownership of member data; that is one of the explicit commitments of the participation framework, alongside taking no equity in participating institutions, taking no deposits, and making no lending decisions. The infrastructure is shared. The institution remains the institution.

Maslow is structured to exit into steward ownership. All investor returns are capped under the Company’s Constitution, and once those caps are met, ownership of the Company transitions to the HAPPI Foundation—a not-for-profit that holds the infrastructure as a global commons. The structure is deliberately designed so the network cannot be captured by a single actor or sold out from under the institutions that depend on it. Profit is limited and bounded by the constitution—the governance protections are structural and binding, not a statement of intent.

The fourth layer of the system is a federated coordination structure that keeps power distributed and accountability local. Member institutions retain their own licences, boards, and community relationships throughout. The protections are written into HAPPI’s founding Covenant, which becomes binding when the foundation is established.

Maslow earns through a per-member infrastructure fee paid by participating institutions, projected at approximately USD $1–5 per member per month, scaling with usage and the scope of utilities the institution adopts. The fee is the same for all institutions of comparable scale and usage—there is no per-institution price discrimination based on what the market will bear.

Where jurisdictional economics warrant it—institutions operating in lower-income markets, or where the headline fee would be disproportionate—participation may be supported through a structured concession underwritten by grant funding rather than cross-subsidised by other institutions.

It is a set of structural choices rather than a value statement. The fee is per-member—it scales with the institution’s mission of serving members, not with the volume of financial activity flowing through them, which removes the incentive to push members into higher-margin products. Investor returns are bounded by design: investors underwrite the build, not the perpetual operation. And Maslow takes nothing that belongs to the institution—no equity, no deposits, no lending decisions, no member data.

Once the infrastructure passes into HAPPI, the fee becomes the operating budget of a perpetual commons. By structure, it generates no profit that can be extracted by any party—there are no shareholders left to pay. The fee is bounded by what the system costs to operate, maintain, and advance.

Maslow is deliberately time-bound. It exists to build the infrastructure and then dissolve into HAPPI, the not-for-profit foundation that will hold the infrastructure permanently on behalf of the institutions that use it. After that transition, the per-member fee continues, but its character changes: it is no longer revenue against a build phase, it is the operating budget of a perpetual commons—funding the strength, security, and continued innovation of the infrastructure for every participating institution.

Maslow Holdings is planning not to raise equity capital again after the current round. From there, the build is funded by fees for service paid by participating institutions—not by further dilution or further extraction.

Yes—through two doors. For investors, materials including the Investment Memorandum are available on request and under confidentiality; nothing on this website is an offer of securities or an invitation to invest. For philanthropic and grant funders, Maslow has a clear preference: if grant capital is available to underwrite the build in place of equity, we will take it, because it lets the infrastructure reach institutions on the most favourable terms possible. Either way, the place to start is the contact page, which has a dedicated route for investors and funders.

The build runs in five named phases over roughly eighteen months, from the close of the Maslow raise to a functioning product (an MVP) in the hands of the founding cohort. The four years that follow are where the network compounds. The phases are phase-relative rather than date-anchored, and they overlap by design. You can see the full sequence on the Build page.

The founding cohort is the first group of member-owned institutions to build and deploy the shared infrastructure with Maslow. Identifying and securing that cohort takes six to nine months of senior-leader outreach—qualified through peak bodies—across both the Global Majority and Minority, with a deliberate balance held between them.

Maslow was co-founded by Kane Jackson (Chief Executive Officer), Mina Calvert (Chief Technology Officer), and Caitlin Robinson (Chief Operating Officer). The wider team spans cooperative finance, systems design, technology, and capital markets, supported by a group of advisors from across the global cooperative and community-finance sector, and will be announced on the team page. If you are evaluating Maslow for your institution and want to know who you would be working with, get in touch and we will make the right introductions directly.

The company is named after Abraham Maslow—and that naming carries a history we are responsible for acknowledging. Much of what is associated with Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” has direct antecedents in Blackfoot teachings, in which self-actualisation is the foundation on which community and cultural perpetuity are built—not the apex. We sit with that tension openly rather than smoothing it over. The full statement, its sources, and our Acknowledgement of Country are on the Acknowledgement page.

There are three doors, one conversation. Whether you’re a credit union or member-owned institution, an investor or funder, or press, a researcher, or a movement ally, every enquiry reaches a person on the team within two business days—read carefully and answered personally. Start at the Get in touch page, or email contact us.