Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:13:58 · Pranav Sood
[00:13:58] S3: I think it's I think it's very different. So there are a couple of things. One is from a regulatory perspective. There's probably a little bit more harmonization across The UK and Europe certainly than there is across the Asian, you know, sphere of of operations. Clearly, language, you know, we have a number of different languages across Europe, but English is kind of a lingua franca that you can generally do business in, particularly in the startup world, most people will be able to do business in English quite well. In Asia, there are really some quite significant variations. Of course, you know, you can do English in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, but if you want to start doing business in China or Japan or elsewhere, actually need to be able to do things in in Mandarin or Japanese or or Thai or or whatever. I think, you know, we don't really have the the super apps that that Asia does in The UK and Europe to the same extent. So, of course, you know, you have some of the neo banks that the Revolut and so on to the world trying to create those ecosystems, but they are an order of magnitude less, all encompassing than what you see with Grab or WeChat or or Ali or whatever, where everything has kind of come into that ecosystem, and you can do everything from booking taxis to buying cinema tickets to managing your money in in a single, you know, single experience. So I think I wouldn't stretch the similarities too far. But I would say definitely the key point is that if you've come from a place where it's really important to be local and to recognize the specificities, helps you to perhaps take a slightly more nuanced approach to entering the European markets than someone who's come from America where it's, you know, one big domestic domestic market, albeit with state by state differences, then coming across to Europe and thinking about it as rest of world, you know, and just assuming that that you can do the same thing and and it'll work just as well.
00:15:47 · David Barton-Grimley
[00:15:47] S2: It'd be good to talk a little bit about the pandemic. And the the reason why I'm raising this is because if you look at your meteoric growth over the last few years, I mean, you know, at least two of those years have been during a pandemic, a global pandemic. And I I think as we all know that some of the harshest lockdowns and restrictions were happening in various countries across APAC. You look at places like Hong Kong, Singapore. I mean, for goodness sakes, Australia was completely isolated and and locked down for a very, very long time. You know, with you sitting in EMEA and as a global business, did you feel any impact in The UK and Europe because of what was happening in APAC? And did you see maybe some of those restrictions as a stress test of growth in the twenty twenties?
00:16:33 · Pranav Sood
[00:16:33] S3: Well, you know what? We actually grew exponentially during those two years. And so to the extent we saw an impact in The UK and and Europe during that period, it was actually here's a business that's growing, you know, massively in the Asian region. That gives us the ability to invest, it gives us brilliant investors that have come on board during that period. And it gives us a whole bunch of customers who are looking to, you know, expand their businesses around the world and use our infrastructure everywhere. And so I don't think we saw a negative impact at all. I do think part of that is because the book of business that we have is actually quite broad, and covers a number of sectors, some of whom were more negatively impacted and others of whom were more positively impacted during that period. So for example, we do a lot in ecommerce. So as I mentioned, we work with businesses like Shein, know, GOAT, the sneakers marketplace, you know, plus plus plus. And everybody, I think, will know that during that couple of years, e comm businesses were massively benefited, because people moved to shopping online, people, you know, didn't have necessarily the ability to go and go in store and do things. And so that part of our book grew massively, Perhaps you during that time, some of the more travel businesses were a little bit slower. So you look at AQantas, for example, of course, during that period, they were doing a little bit less business than they are now. So you get that balancing effect across an entire portfolio of businesses where some benefit from a particular moment in the macroeconomic situation and others have a countervailing impact. So I think net net, it was a period of huge growth for us. And actually coming out of it, you know, even where we have seen perhaps a slightly slower growth in the e comm sector globally, we've seen a whole bunch of other sectors who have picked up and, you know, continue to power our our growth and expansion.
00:18:26 · David Barton-Grimley
[00:18:26] S2: And is there anything you you would say that, you know, fintechs or financial institutions in the European market can almost learn from some of the challenges and growth that you have faced in in APAC amidst the extremely strict lockdowns, remote teams, etcetera, etcetera?
00:18:46 · Pranav Sood
[00:18:46] S3: So I think one of the things that's been most interesting for me joining Airwallex is that I've come from... I came from GoCardless. I spent nearly five years at GoCardless. GoCardless is also a global business, but it's a much more UK and Western European oriented business. And so, you know, GoCardless, our leadership group was mostly in London. The decision making was mostly in London. To the extent that we had folks around the world, they tended to be go to market satellites rather than, you know, full offices and full regional regional hubs. We, as Airwallex, are a very distributed company. And so when you look at our exec team, I sit in London, I have a colleague who sits in San Francisco, we have folks in Melbourne, we have folks in Singapore, we have folks in Hong Kong. And so we operate in a very distributed way. And that operating model has enabled us to be pretty lean, but also pretty agile when it comes to adapting to the situations that the business faces. And I think that's one thing that I think is quite different from many of the European businesses that I see where mostly their exec teams and their leadership groups sit within a single office or a couple of offices at most. At most, they're probably one or two time zones apart. And so obviously, that has some big benefits in the sense that you have that togetherness, you have that ability to hang out with one another. But I think it may also detract from your ability to be really local and build really local businesses around the world. And for me, I have the benefit of having, obviously, lots of go to market folks in EMEA, but also a legal team, a finance team, a people team, a compliance team. We have engineers in Amsterdam. We have operations people as well. And so with that, I can try and build something which is a truly localized business for the needs of the customers that I'm trying to serve. And so I think that's maybe just one thing that that, you know, that we do slightly differently, which I think helps us to to try and take a slightly more local approach.
00:20:47 · David Barton-Grimley
[00:20:47] S2: That's really interesting. It feels like the idea of the HQ is changing completely and you're driving efficiencies through the distributed model as opposed to the traditional way of looking at it, which would be efficiencies through centralized model. But as you say, you cannot have a local and a global business, you know, that particular way. So you have to have some capabilities within market. You were touching earlier on when we were talking about the pandemic about, you know, the growth of e commerce and how, certain sectors were growing and certain sectors were shrinking, it'd be good to talk a little bit about customer expectations and how you see that trajectory of growth and where some of those behaviors might be changing over the next few years based on what you're seeing in EMEA and also in APAC.