If you haven’t heard of Airwallex yet, CEO Jack Zhang is betting that you will soon. Providing cross-border payments and other financial solutions, Airwallex is catering to the growing number of global businesses whose operations, employees and markets span multiple borders and timezones. 
“In two to three years time, everybody will think about Airwallex when they're thinking about doing business globally,” says Zhang.
With growth of at least 300% in every market it operates and a revenue run rate that is expected to triple to $300m over the next year, Airwallex is expanding rapidly, and collecting high-profile clients in the process. This has seen it gain considerable support among investors, with its most recent funding round, an oversubscribed Series E raise announced in November 2021, valuing it at $5.5bn.
Catering to both small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and the platforms that serve them, Airwallex provides a growing suite of products that are all centered around reducing friction in global operations. And somewhat unusually, it is doing so primarily with its own direct infrastructure. 
“Airwallex is an infrastructure-first, API-first company,” says Zhang. “We don't have any dependencies in our core technology stack; we're principal acquirer, we're principal issuer.”

Airwallex’s cross-border payments platform

Founded in 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, Airwallex began as a provider of cross-border payment disbursement and collections, building up its own proprietary global money movement infrastructure for over the course of its first three years.
This saw the company initially focus on high-growth startups, as well as marketplaces such as JD.com, for which it provides mass global payout disbursement services. However, over time it has expanded to more of a software as a service (SaaS) model, with many organizations paying a fixed monthly amount to access services on its platform rather than paying individual fees and margins on specific cross-border transactions. 
Here they have access not only to domestic and international payouts, but also to services including payments acceptance, treasury and card issuing. Over the last seven years Airwallex has also expanded its reach, and now supports disbursement using its own infrastructure in over 90 countries.
 
“We only started getting traction after we were able to pay out to more than 50 countries,” explains Zhang.
“Even today more than 60% of our revenue still comes from startups, marketplaces and digital companies around the world, either through direct payment processing – whether it’s collection, payout or issuing – or through embedded finance.”
The range of products it offers on its platform means that Airwallex’s customer base is relatively diverse both in terms of business focus and how they use the company’s services. Papaya Global, for example, has used the company’s SaaS platform as a foundation for its global payroll solution, while cross-border digital brokerage Stake uses Airwallex for payment collection, storage, conversion and payouts. 

From cross-border payments to a global bank

While such services remain the majority of Airwallex’s offering, it has also increasingly been growing its business account products, which now account for around 40% of its business. 
These are designed for the growing number of global businesses that need to operate with ease across multiple borders, and include services such as domestic and international accounts, as well as cross-border transfers and FX, with support for 50+ currencies and 100+ countries. The company also provides multicurrency cards, most recently launching US Airwallex Borderless Card, a virtual multicurrency Visa card for US SMBs, in February.

“We want to empower US headquartered businesses growing globally – there's very few companies out there that can help them,” Zhang explains.
He likens the business account offering to a “global virtual bank”, but with trappings best suited to tech-focused companies.
“Basically it's like a digital bank that’s competing with global banks like Citi, but we build it in a way where everything is digital native,” he says. 
“The company’s purpose is to be connecting the business builders, entrepreneurs, the creators around the world to the borderless opportunities. To help them to grow in their business without borders, and to give them access to these opportunities without the constraint of the traditional financial infrastructure or financial system.”
This focus has seen Airwallex move from assisting companies purely with their cross-border needs to providing a rounded service that handles all of their domestic and international financial needs.
“Essentially we wanted to not just service customers' cross-border needs, but also provide, in a nutshell, all-in-one finance: a financial operating system for small businesses.”

Building a cross-border payments infrastructure beyond Swift

While many companies offer platform services for products such as embedded finance, Airwallex’s proprietary infrastructure does give it a significant edge. While some companies only have a limited number of connections to a third party provider, Airwallex has more than 90 connections over the 90 countries it serves, with most countries having multiple partners. This enables it to manage its payments more directly than with competitors who pay to use another company’s infrastructure.
“We don't like to buy infrastructure like some of our competitors,” says Zhang, adding that he sees this as losing control of key factors in security and compliance. 
“I don't personally believe that you can buy infrastructure because essentially, the infrastructure is programmatic money movement: the core tech stack. We know about data solvency; where the data is stored; the security; how the data is transformed and moved; how we’re thinking about local regulation and global regulation.”
He says that when the company was initially developing its offering, it decided to build its own infrastructure because he and his team “just couldn't find anyone that we liked from a technology tech stack standpoint”. 

“That's why we built one ourselves, and especially we built it in a way that's multicurrency native,” he says. “The reason that we can be so successful today is because everything we build is coming from a global standpoint from day one.”
The strength of Airwallex’s infrastructure has led some to suggest that is is attempting to provide a more modern replacement for international bank messaging service SWIFT, however Zhang sees the company as being “more complementary to the SWIFT network”.
“I wouldn't say the company's vision is to replace SWIFT,” he says.
“Right now 93%, of the transactions within Airwallex are going through our own proprietary network, but about 7% are going through SWIFT. 
“As we get more sophisticated with our network, that percentage is probably going to go up, but we’re not really competing in the infrastructure space. We’re competing on the platform space or the software space, where we are not trying to sell to the banks as a protocol.”
However, this combined platform and infrastructure leads Zhang to believe that the company has few competitors that match its offering.
“I think the only one that has the same quality is Stripe Connect,” he explains.
“I don’t see anyone that has, one the one hand, the strength of our infrastructure, but on the other hand, the technology stack we have that allows our customers to build on top of us.”

Next steps: Lending, crypto and beyond

While Airwallex has already expanded its product offering considerably, the company does have more in the pipeline, including plans to expand into lending. 
“We’re launching a credit solution; we're literally building it right now,” explains Zhang. “We're probably launching it mid this year or towards the end of this year.”
It is also exploring the crypto space, particularly given how crypto is “deeply embedded in the digital economy now”. Zhang says the company is building a “a crypto product that potentially doesn't have anything to do with the crypto itself” that enables crypto trading.

More immediately, meanwhile, the company continues to expand its reach globally.
“We are actually in the process of launching Middle East right now and we're launching in South America very soon,” Zhang explains. “I think very soon we'll have global coverage.”
Scaling is hampered by the fact that the company can’t just buy regional players and plug them in due to its unique infrastructure, however there may be other opportunities for acquisitions to help continue its impressive growth. 
“We built our network and our product as digital native, multicurrency native and global native. That's fundamentally different, so it's very hard to do acquisitions on that,” he says.
“But for software on top of that, you can potentially do acquisitions. So we are looking at potential interesting companies in this space, for example tax management, subscription management, to add value.”

For now, though, the immediate focus continues to be on growth.
“Airwallex in general is growing super fast,” he says. “And as we launch these domestic features, that speed of customer acquisition and expansion of our pool is going to be even further accelerated.”