The Founder Files with Maddi Ingham from GreenPay: Turning Payments Into A Force For Good
Welcome to The Founder Files, an inside look at the women building the next generation of category-defining companies. These conversations capture founders in moments of becoming. No polished retrospective or glossy highlights reel. This is where we catch ambitious women in motion: when the decisions are still hard, the outcomes still uncertain, and the lessons are still fresh enough to actually be useful.
Maddi Ingham will be the first to tell you the world doesn't need another payments company. She, alongside her co-founder, built one anyway, but with an important point of difference.
GreenPay doesn’t exist just to move money. Alongside powering millions of dollars of transactions, they donate 50% of profits to fund direct actions and solutions that help protect and restore our environment. The goal is to help businesses make a difference without doing anything different (or paying more).
In this conversation, Maddi gets honest about why purpose-led business is fast becoming a competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have, what it actually takes to build a sales function with no playbook, and why she believes every business has a role to play in our collective future, whether they're ready to admit it yet or not.
Q. Tell us about GreenPay in your own words. What are you building, and why does it need to exist?
“Quite frankly, the world doesn't need another payments company. What it does need, though, is more funding going back to protecting and restoring nature.
Currently, less than 0.1% of Australia’s federal budget is spent on nature, and it's not enough. In more specific terms, Australia is estimated to require $8.3 billion annually to protect and repair nature, plus ongoing management funding. Yet, in total, Australia spent approximately $1.5 billion to protect, restore and manage nature in FY25 - not even 20% of what is required.
Plus, Australia has one of the highest deforestation rates in the OECD, and globally, we've lost 73% of biodiversity since 1970. In just 50 or so years, we've lost seven out of 10 pieces of biodiversity.
We wanted to solve that. How are we doing it? By building a payments company. We founded GreenPay as a full-stack payment solution: whether your business takes payments in-store or online, by credit card or direct debit, we can help move the money. Then, we donate 50% of our profits via the GreenPay Foundation.
“Our hope is to begin to close this funding gap so we can start to turn the tide on the biodiversity crisis Australia is in.” - Maddi Ingham
Q. What does building this business actually look like right now? What's consuming most of your energy this week?
“The first bucket is focused on AI, automation, and ops. This is the side of the business that I lead. As a really small team, it is critical that we use automation and AI to help us scale as fast as possible so that we can have the most impact.
Practically, that looks like using agents to streamline a lot of our knowledge structure and knowledge database for easy information capture, and eventually to train a customer service agent on. We're also using them to help with some of our marketing cadences, so turning blogs into LinkedIn or Instagram content. It also looks like optimising some of our outbound sales processes to be much more automated so that we can bring on more customers faster and have a greater impact.
The second is the finance bucket. We're in the middle of a few end-of-month processes that I need to get stuck into, including reviewing our revenue and cash flow, invoicing our customers, and updating our projections. There are also ongoing sales, so chasing them through the pipeline to get them live as quickly as possible. We also just got into a program that kicks off next week, so we are doing some of the onboarding for that.”
Q. What do you know about purpose-led payment processing that most people are still sleeping on?
“That it's a no-brainer? If you could have the same or better product, for the same or better price, and this one gives back to nature, while the other likely funds deforestation or sends profits offshore to US tech billionaires, then why would you not?
I think the problem is that people just don't know that this option exists. It's not normally a part of their supply chain that they have ever examined; it tends to be pretty set and forget.”
“The more we can help Aussie businesses hear about us and purpose-led payment processing, the faster and greater impact we can have.” - Maddi Ingham
Q. What's the one thing you wish someone had handed you at the start - a framework, a rule, a piece of advice - that you've had to figure out the hard way?
“It would have been something around setting up a sales function. I've never really seen one in action up close, so trying to figure out the information we needed, the tools to implement, how to actually set up a CRM, sales scripting and objection handling, and the marketing materials we should have on hand was overwhelming. And that's before we even look at automating any of the processes or doing anything that established businesses have long since set up.
“I wish someone had said to me earlier, ‘You can have comfort, or you can have growth, but you can't have both.’ It's a quote I've come back to almost every day.” - Maddi Ingham
Q. As a founder of a purpose-led business and certified social enterprise, what advice would you give to other leaders about using their business as a force for good?
“Especially in the current climate, people are looking for ways that they can have an impact in their life. And one of the easiest ways is to make a switch, whether it’s to a more sustainable product, to tweak your personal ethics, increase donations to local charities, or to run a business that’s trying to do something good for our planet because you feel powerless.
More and more people expect businesses to do the right thing. 73% of Australians expect businesses to be doing everything they can to be environmentally friendly. If you're a business that hasn't considered this yet, it's a real threat because you will start to lose customers to more ethical options.
Every business has a role to play in impact, and every business should be thinking about the specific role that they can play. I really look forward to the day that social enterprise or ethical business is the norm, not the exception.”
“At the end of the day, we each get to choose the impact we have on this world. Why not make it a good one?” - Maddi Ingham
Want to follow the GreenPay journey?
If Maddi's story has you rethinking where your business sends its money, GreenPay is worth a closer look.
Whether your business takes payments in-store or online, GreenPay can handle the infrastructure and put 50% of profits back into protecting the nature we're all running out of time to save. Learn more at the GreenPay website.
For the behind-the-scenes of building a purpose-led business in real time, follow GreenPay on LinkedIn.
And if you want to follow Maddi's journey as a founder, she's one to watch on LinkedIn, too.