What people ask us.

HAPPI — the Human Alliance for People and Planetary Infrastructure — is the intended enduring stewardship and people’s-commons architecture for shared financial infrastructure serving the world’s community-owned financial institutions: credit unions, cooperatives, mutuals, and CDFIs. It is intended to be the coordination layer beneath those institutions, not a replacement for them. The HAPPI Foundation does not yet legally exist.

The infrastructure itself is built and operated by Maslow. HAPPI is intended, once the Foundation is legally established and operationally capable, to steward the relevant shared connective infrastructure so that it is not captured or sold out from under the institutions that depend on it — a design objective to be implemented through definitive governance and legal arrangements.

Maslow Holdings Pty Ltd is the current commercial builder and operator: it raises capital, employs and engages the team, develops and operates technology, enters contracts and carries execution risk. HAPPI is the intended enduring stewardship and people’s-commons architecture for the relevant shared connective infrastructure and post-cap ownership. The HAPPI Foundation does not yet legally exist. Maslow is constitution-governed and covenant-aligned; HAPPI is intended to be covenant-governed under its own final founding documents.

The two roles are deliberately separate. Keeping the builder distinct from the intended steward is part of the anti-capture design objective, to be implemented through definitive governance and legal arrangements. More on how HAPPI is held →

HAPPI is for the community- and member-owned financial institutions that join, and for the network they create together. Each institution keeps its own licence, board, and community relationships — HAPPI is intended to steward the shared layer beneath them, not a replacement for them. The beneficiaries are the institutions and their members, never an outside shareholder.

HAPPI is intended to hold three things in common for the institutions: a coordination layer that lets separate institutions act together; the shared rails they run on — payments, lending, savings, credit, liquidity, shared risk, built once and used by all; and the governance covenants designed to protect the shared layer from capture or sale.

It is infrastructure, not a product. Each institution keeps everything that makes it what it is, and gains the shared layer beneath it that no single institution could build alone.

HAPPI stands for the Human Alliance for People and Planetary Infrastructure. The name is the point: an alliance of institutions, intended to hold shared infrastructure for people and the planet rather than for private return.

At least 178,555 member-owned financial institutions serve at least 508.7 million members and hold at least US$11.30 trillion in assets across 109 countries and jurisdictions. They already possess extraordinary distributed strength, but remain fragmented across jurisdictions, technology systems, vendors and institutional networks — carrying substantial regulatory, cybersecurity, technology and service obligations despite being a fraction of the size of global commercial banks.

Existing shared-service models have created valuable capabilities, but remain partial and generally bounded by jurisdiction, institution type, product or vendor. Maslow’s proposition is a neutral cross-jurisdictional connective layer that preserves each institution’s licence, local identity, member relationship and authority while enabling shared capability across the wider system.

It has, and it is the largest example of shared infrastructure in history: the internet. The protocols that let any two computers communicate — the foundational standards underneath everything online — were built as open, unowned commons. No company owns the ability for one machine to talk to another. Trillions of dollars of commercial value were built on top of that commons, and the commons stayed a commons.

But the internet is also the warning. The protocols stayed open; the layers built on top of them did not. Search, payments, social, app stores — useful infrastructure with no binding commitment to stay open gets captured, then repriced and turned against the people who depend on it. The open standard was necessary, but it was not sufficient.

That gap is what HAPPI is designed to close. The coordination layer and the shared rails are the open standard. The governance covenants are intended to be the part the internet never had: binding commitments — to be implemented through the Foundation’s establishment process and definitive legal arrangements — that keep what is built on the commons from being bought out from under the institutions that hold it. Open infrastructure, plus the anchorage designed to keep it open.

That risk is one reason ownership, pricing, institutional authority and governance are being designed together. Participating institutions are intended to retain their licences, balance sheets, member relationships, local identity and authority. The shared layer is intended to be stewarded for the commons rather than owned by a vendor able to sell or reprice it solely for private return.

The HAPPI Covenant expresses the intended stewardship architecture; the Foundation’s final legal form and protections will be settled through its establishment process and appropriate legal review. The final model must still provide sufficient revenue and operating capability to maintain secure infrastructure. Non-profit or stewarded ownership removes a private extraction incentive; it does not remove the continuing need for competent, accountable governance.

That outcome is what the architecture is designed to prevent: the intended structure holds the shared layer under covenant-governed stewardship rather than in a company that can change hands. The final Foundation documents have not yet been adopted, so no unamendable legal protection is claimed to already exist. The design objective is to place the permanent mission and anti-capture protections beyond ordinary operating discretion, and to make any attempted departure visible and accountable — settled through the establishment process and appropriate legal review.

The commercial build is carried by Maslow Holdings Pty Ltd, which raises capital and carries execution risk. Investor financial returns are capped under the applicable constitutional and contractual architecture, and the intended end-state is for the HAPPI Foundation, once legally established and operationally capable, to own or control post-cap equity directly or through a trust or vehicle it controls.

On the institution side, Maslow is testing a transparent, capacity-adjusted per-member fee with the inaugural cohort. The current model applies a common US$0.05 monthly floor and US$2.00 monthly cap. Final pricing remains subject to cohort validation and definitive agreements. Anyone who wants to carry this direction, whatever they carry it with, starts where everyone starts: register your interest →

The First Cohort of community-owned financial institutions — drawn in deliberate balance from the Global Majority and the Global Minority — specifies what the first release must do, in what order, and to what standard. Not HAPPI alone, and not capital. The institutions that hold it decide what it is. Holding in common begins with deciding in common.

No. The design principle is “light global, heavy local.” The shared layer is built to sit on top of what an institution already runs, rather than rip and replace it, and shared standards mean each institution that joins lowers the cost of joining for the next. Each institution keeps its own licence, board, and member relationships throughout.

The First Cohort is the first group of community-owned institutions to build and deploy the shared infrastructure — drawn in deliberate balance from the Global Majority and the Global Minority. Following Minimum Target Completion, Maslow intends to assemble an inaugural formation group of approximately 20–30 suitable member-owned financial institutions across multiple jurisdictions; the current planning model tests a balanced 12+12 cohort. They are not just early adopters: they specify what the first release must do, in what order, and to what standard. The infrastructure is shaped by the institutions that will hold it, from the start.

The build sequence begins at Minimum Target Completion under the Maslow Offer: an inaugural formation group of approximately 20–30 institutions, an intensive week-long residency to define the MVP, a 28-day internal decision period, and a gate of at least 10 binding institutional agreements to fund and participate before the six-month MVP build is committed. The years that follow are where the network compounds — institution by institution, region by region. The full sequence is laid out on The Build.

Maslow has already built the operating foundations required to execute the next phase: four proprietary operating applications, a unified internal operating environment, investor and registry infrastructure, institutional intelligence, a production HAPPI Atlas foundation and controlled governance, security and evidence systems. The next step is commercial validation and co-definition of the institution-facing MVP with the inaugural cohort.

Every institution that joins adds value for every other one. Shared standards lower the cost of joining for the next, and the things that are stronger when pooled — liquidity, risk, capacity — grow with each new member. And because the governance is designed in rather than bolted on, the design objective is that an institution can join without being locked in or captured later.

Register your interest. The first cohort of community- and member-owned financial institutions specifies what the infrastructure must do, in what order, and to what standard — so the conversation begins with telling us where your institution stands. Register your interest →

The work reaches beyond the founding institutions. Whether you are a funder, a researcher, a movement ally, or someone who simply believes the cooperative economy needs infrastructure of its own, there is a way to take part. Start by registering your interest →