Removing Borders and Barriers to Streamline Transactions and Spur the Global Digital Economy

In a Nutshell: Anyone in the world with an internet connection can do business with anyone else. But national borders and currencies create costly transaction bottlenecks that deter businesses with global aspirations. Airwallex emerged in Australia when a group of café owners decided to do something about the morass of fees and delays that challenged their dreams of international expansion. Today, Airwallex global accounts, borderless cards, and cross-border payment solutions encourage thousands of companies of all sizes to take a global approach to growth.

We like to say that the best business ideas solve a problem the founders experienced personally. That’s what happened with Airwallex, a company that strives to make international business money management as seamless as your last swipe or tap at the coffee shop.

In fact, that’s where the idea for Airwallex took shape — in a coffee shop that happened to be in Melbourne, Australia. The owners had aspirations to expand their business internationally, but the exorbitant costs and bureaucratic obstacles of cross-border transactions had them spinning their wheels. The bottom line impact disproportionately affected their small business compared to competitors with more resources.

The bottlenecks were not in the purchasing process per se but in the mechanics of moving money internationally via traditional banking pathways. The team decided to abandon their push for global coffee domination in favor of leveling the eCommerce playing field. Airwallex is the result.

Felix Leopold, Head of SME and Growth, North America, said Airwallex consolidates the complexities of global eCommerce into a unified platform, lowering barriers to participation by simplifying management and compliance.

It makes competing internationally a viable goal for everyone with an idea and the impetus to bring it to market.

Now, the former coffee team had a winner. Expansion plans first targeted other parts of APAC and Europe before moving outward from there. The company has been in the U.S. for four years and is planning a deeper presence in North and South America.

“The beauty of Airwallex is that, like our customers, we have been truly international from day one,” Leopold said. “We grow with our customers by constantly expanding our footprint.”

Product and service expansion has also been constant. Their global accounts can accept currencies in more than 60 countries. The platform accepts more than 120 local payment methods and credit card transactions from more than 180 currencies.

“Our sweet spot is in the SMB space where businesses already have some exposure to other markets,” Leopold said. “But as soon as you have customers or suppliers from around the world, that’s when Airwallex can serve you.”

The great thing about it is it doesn’t matter why a business might want to transact internationally. Businesses of all sizes come to Airwallex with a need to transact with international suppliers. Others with a purely domestic customer base tap the company’s services to pay employees abroad.

Leopold said tech companies fit the Airwallex model particularly well because it’s easy for them to scale internationally. Travel is another industry with strong international exposure and an acute need for Airwallex services.

Notwithstanding the problems the original Airwallex team had with their coffee shop, any eCommerce business can quickly extend across borders when the supply chain logistics are right.

That’s what Airwallex does. The core of the platform is the global business account, an all-in-one tool to manage currencies and foreign exchange, make high-speed international money transfers to more than 150 countries, and dispense physical and virtual borderless cards on demand.

Airwallex has supplemented native accounting integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, and NetSuite with partnerships.

“Through our partners, we are offering a lot more accounting integrations and will be bringing more to market,” Leopold said.

Integrations with eCommerce platforms include Shopify, WooCommerce, and any native shopping carts Airwallex eCommerce customers develop. The team is also looking to expand into HR integrations. Having the capability to link employer data to an Airwallex will enable teams to spin up cards faster.

An account management team works with new customers throughout the relatively straightforward account setup process. Customers go through KYC customer-identity protocols once in return for access to a potent global financial tool.

The reality for the team is that the complexities of international corporate relationships make every customer relationship unique. Airwallex embraces that challenge and takes pride in applying its institutional expertise to solve customer problems.

“Every customer requires a consultative approach to receive the right advice and make full use of what Airwallex offers them,” Leopold said.

The global account allows businesses to deploy fleets of multicurrency borderless cards for expense management. All it takes is a quick login to spin up a new virtual card. Airwallex will also send any physical cards you require via mail.

“We’re enabling businesses to get paid via cards and local payment methods, manage and dispense international currencies from a single account, and spin up new virtual and physical cards on demand,” Leopold said.

Leopold said granular controls put card programs under management strictures appropriate to each business. Airwallex charges no international transaction fees and pays 1.5% cash back, which means more cash to put toward achieving your business goals.

The platform allows customers to issue cards to their entire multinational workforce, putting all local and global purchases under the same set of eyes.

Employees and firms transact directly from the Airwallex multicurrency wallet to eliminate unnecessary currency conversion fees.

“Set limits according to duration or merchant category code to control employee spending,” Leopold said. “It’s very easy to configure those sorts of controls and link them to your expense policies.”

Leopold said placing real-time spending visibility, control, and seamless monthly reconciliations within the purview of a single platform significantly reduces the challenges and expenses of managing a global small business.

For users without the necessary currency balance, for example, the platform will auto-convert available funds in the user’s home currency at market-leading FX rates.

Bill pay for global small firms becomes significantly more convenient through the efficiencies of Airwallex’s single platform. Airwallex uses OCR technology to extract relevant data from physical bills, reducing the need for manual data entry for faster account reconciliations.

“We bring our international expertise to minimize FX charges and avoid the foreign merchant fees we very often see in the market,” Leopold said. “As soon as there is some component of international business, Airwallex exists to support all customers and suppliers.”

The result is a platform that puts everyone and everything on the same page so owners and managers can concentrate less on paying to move money and more on what inspired them to get into business in the first place.

Your goal might not be global coffee domination, but our next great global business almost certainly grew out of a spark of an idea in someone’s head. Airwallex makes it easier for small businesses to compete on the worldwide stage through merit rather than chance.

In terms of measuring the benefits, Leopold said the motif of cheaper, faster, and better describes Airwallex’s effect. Comparative data on FX fees and transaction charges shows it can save up to 80% over traditional banks. International money transfers are generally same-day transactions as opposed to weeklong odysseys through the SWIFT system.

That takes care of cheaper and faster. Better, Leopold said, is more challenging to quantify yet perhaps most important of all.

Leopold understands “better” in terms of the effect Airwallex has on employees who find themselves freed from tedious and error-prone manual labor to do inspirational work on behalf of their team — whatever that may mean for each business.

That means surer footing for decision-making. Owners and managers who face inflection points with less than perfect certainty are bound to question their choices, course-correct too aggressively, and miss crucial opportunities where quick action would have paid off.

Airwallex grows as its customers grow. Understanding the expansion plans of long-time customers helps Airwallex chart where to place new payment rails. When transaction pathways open for one, they open for all, so growth compounds itself.

That’s why Airwallex is now a team of 1,500 across 23 international offices. Prioritizing customer growth and solving new user challenges helps Airwallex continually add new features.

For example, Airwallex will soon leverage AI to automate common finance processes. And through Airwallex Yield, the company is beginning to enter traditional bank territory by offering low-risk money market investments. There’s more to come.

“We want to get rid of the administrative hassles typically associated with international money management — whatever they are,” Leopold said.