Jeromee “JJ” Johnson has spent his career building and operating financial markets and is now focused on consumer finance. As President and CTO of Tellus App, Inc., a fintech and proptech company, he’s watched the financial services industry drift toward something he doesn’t like.
“It reinforces a financial nihilism among consumers and does real damage to their future financial prospects,” Johnson says.
He’s talking about speculation. Betting dressed up as investing. The kind of quick-hit financial behavior that trades a real plan for a rush. Johnson thinks it’s a problem, and he thinks technology bears some responsibility for it. He blames the way many tools are designed: to keep users trading or betting rather than saving.
Tellus App was built with a different premise in mind. Founded in 2016 by Rocky Lee and T Zhu, the company is powered by real estate. It has raised $26 million, including a $16 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2022. Tellus has reached profitability and continues to expand the breadth of its product offerings and its partnerships. Tellus is not a bank. Tellus is not FDIC-insured.
Before Tellus, Johnson was on the executive team at BATS Global Markets during its run from a single equity exchange to one of the largest cross-asset exchange operators in the world. He built the BATS Options Exchange from scratch and, after the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, led the effort across U.S. exchanges to harmonize the rules for clearly erroneous trades and to modernize market-wide circuit breakers. Later, he ran global markets at Miami International Holdings. He also co-founded 3D Markets, the country’s first equity options dark pool. He studied math and physics at Yale. Johnson is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. He writes and comments on financial markets, housing and consumer finance.
That background shapes his focus on incentives in consumer finance: what a product encourages people to do, and what happens as a result.
Financial Behavior Over Speculation
The financial services industry, in his view, keeps tilting toward speculation instead of encouraging sound personal finance behavior, and that shift carries a cost that shows up years later, not immediately.
He’s spoken publicly about this trend, warning that his children’s generation will inherit a financial system designed to turn them into gamblers rather than savers. The pattern worries him because it reframes personal finance as speculation rather than steady progress.
The fix, as he describes it, is financial products designed to reward saving rather than trading. “Know the difference between saving and investing,” he says. “It’s okay to take risk when you understand what the risk actually is, and when you can genuinely afford it. Most people skip that prior question entirely.”
In the Tellus App, members earn rewards by claiming Boosts or completing tasks tied to them. Under Tellus’s terms of service, a claimed Boost cannot be taken away or retroactively altered. Members can also set goals, complete short financial education quizzes and build streaks. Tellus is not a bank. Tellus is not FDIC-insured.
For landlords and tenants, Tellus also offers free property management software for rent, expenses and maintenance requests. Property owners remain responsible for managing their properties.
Separately, on the lending side, Tellus makes business-purpose loans on non-owner-occupied residential properties with one to four units. It works through licensed mortgage brokers, its loans are secured by liens, and it does not make consumer loans.
Johnson has been public about where he thinks the industry is headed if the shift toward transaction-driven products continues unchecked. Consumers, he argues, deserve tools built around their long-term financial standing rather than short-term dopamine. He frames this as an argument for pointing innovation somewhere more useful.
Building Financial Wellness Through Better Habits
Ask Johnson how Tellus stays ahead of industry trends, and he doesn’t talk about reading reports.
“We don’t stay informed by reading about technology, we stay informed by building with it,” he says.
Tellus runs a program called Forge Labs, pairing engineering and operations on a regular cadence to test what’s changing and how real customers use the product.
“We’re integrating AI into how the company operates, top-to-bottom, rather than bolting it on,” Johnson says. He says the discipline behind it is simple: “The key operating discipline is to focus on solving the structural problems.”
In the app, members get a reminder to complete a goal, or an invitation to claim a Boost tied to a completed task, and they decide what to do with it.
Johnson’s view is that technology has a large role to play here. Built one way, an app can pull a user toward impulsive decisions. Built another way, it can help that same user build a habit they’ll still be glad they had five years later. The difference is what the technology is designed to reward.
Mentorship, Ownership and a Culture Built on Trust
Johnson mentors CEOs and small business owners through the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program in Kansas City. He also treats mentorship as part of how Tellus runs internally.
“Mentorship is foundational inside and outside the building,” he says. He also explains that the discipline is the same whether it’s a founder or an employee: design for where you need to be at full maturity, even while executing at today’s stage. That gap between where you are and where you’re headed is where growth happens, he says.
Hiring follows a similar logic. Johnson says he looks for ownership above all else.
“We look for operators who run toward the hard part of the problem instead of around it, and who can hold a high standard without needing to be managed into it,” he says.
Perks and pay matter, but they’re not what keeps people around. “The real benefit is the work and the autonomy to do it well,” he says. “What retains people is a culture where their judgment is respected.”
Fast growth creates its own kind of chaos. “The hardest challenge in a fast-growing company is staying clear when everything is moving at once,” he says. Intentional communication, one of the company’s four core values, is the counterweight. “Clarity is the antidote to chaos,” he says.
Performance management runs the same way. “We manage to outcomes, not motion,” he says. “I’d rather have an honest conversation today than a surprise next quarter.” The same idea runs through how he talks about consumer finance: address the structural issue early, before it compounds into something harder to fix.
A Long-Term Vision for Consumer Financial Wellness
Johnson doesn’t describe innovation as something that happens in a brainstorm session. He says giving capable people real problems and the room to solve them is what produces it, calling that combination the source of creativity inside the company.
That belief extends outward, to how he thinks the broader industry should treat consumers. Financial wellness, in his view, develops over time through education, consistency and tools designed to reinforce good habits instead of chasing engagement for its own sake.
He’s careful about the distinction. Chasing engagement means keeping someone’s attention. Chasing financial wellness means helping someone build a habit strong enough that they don’t need constant attention to be pulled back to it. From the outside, the two goals can look the same: an app open on a phone, a notification tapped. They aim at different things. One wants a user hooked. The other wants a capable user.
Johnson keeps coming back to one question: which behaviors does a financial product reward, and what do those incentives produce for the people using it?
