Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:01:39 · Matt Wood, David M. Brear
[00:01:39] S1: Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's high growth, of course. It's also incredibly diverse. And therefore, it's not always an easy region to do business in when you're running business or running enterprise that covers regions, covers markets, covers borders. And so this notion of getting cross border payments, whether that's for travel, money movement, businesses or consumers, getting that absolutely right and as best as it can be is something that we really spend a lot of time focusing We covered a lot of ground in that conversation, didn't we? But if I could get to the number of what I think we sort of drew out was that the main point to restate I think is that making payments across borders, any type of payment, whether I'm there in person or moving money between countries or paying suppliers, whatever it is, making payments across borders is still way more difficult than it needs to be. [00:02:37] S0: 100%. And it is an amazing sort of tapestry of different systems across all of those different geographies, isn't it? And helping organizations navigate those is no small feat, is it, in that way? But, I mean, I was really struck to hear the... Almost the pivots that we saw from both organizations, you know, really in terms of customers' needs changing overnight and them really having to react. It's an amazing thing to see, isn't it?
00:02:37 · David M. Brear, Matt Wood
[00:02:37] S0: 100%. And it is an amazing sort of tapestry of different systems across all of those different geographies, isn't it? And helping organizations navigate those is no small feat, is it, in that way? But, I mean, I was really struck to hear the... Almost the pivots that we saw from both organizations, you know, really in terms of customers' needs changing overnight and them really having to react. It's an amazing thing to see, isn't it? [00:03:02] S1: Yeah, I mean, Matt and Cecilia spoke, you know, they had great stories to tell about how like fundamentally their product roadmap shifted in many cases overnight, but also to turn that into a real positive where they're sort of primary proposition, if you like dried up overnight, They found their customers interacting with their product in an entirely new way. And in fact, in Cecilia's case, has essentially built a whole new business line around supporting a different need of their customer base that they didn't really even know they had.
00:03:02 · Matt Wood, David M. Brear
[00:03:02] S1: Yeah, I mean, Matt and Cecilia spoke, you know, they had great stories to tell about how like fundamentally their product roadmap shifted in many cases overnight, but also to turn that into a real positive where they're sort of primary proposition, if you like dried up overnight, They found their customers interacting with their product in an entirely new way. And in fact, in Cecilia's case, has essentially built a whole new business line around supporting a different need of their customer base that they didn't really even know they had. [00:03:37] S0: Yeah. It's amazing. In signs of adversity, you gotta either panic or pivot. Right? And and they both did that incredibly well. So in this second part of the show, we're sitting down with a founder in APAC to dive into the weeds a little bit more and offer a different perspective. Eleven f s's own David Barton Grimley was lucky enough to grab some time with Pranav Sud, who is the general manager for EMEA at Airwallex for a really, really interesting chat. You'll hear that after a short message from Visa. Don't go anywhere. Visa's fintech fast track program is streamlining the onboarding process for fintechs, enabling them to gain access to Visa's powerful capabilities and network. Visa and their enablement partners help fintechs launch and scale cards, virtual credentials and disbursement programs. To learn more, visit partner.visa.com.
00:03:37 · David M. Brear, David Barton-Grimley, Pranav Sood
[00:03:37] S0: Yeah. It's amazing. In signs of adversity, you gotta either panic or pivot. Right? And and they both did that incredibly well. So in this second part of the show, we're sitting down with a founder in APAC to dive into the weeds a little bit more and offer a different perspective. Eleven f s's own David Barton Grimley was lucky enough to grab some time with Pranav Sud, who is the general manager for EMEA at Airwallex for a really, really interesting chat. You'll hear that after a short message from Visa. Don't go anywhere. Visa's fintech fast track program is streamlining the onboarding process for fintechs, enabling them to gain access to Visa's powerful capabilities and network. Visa and their enablement partners help fintechs launch and scale cards, virtual credentials and disbursement programs. To learn more, visit partner.visa.com. [00:04:39] S2: I'm David Barton Grimley, global strategy director of embedded financial services here at eleven FS, and I'm delighted to talk to so many amazing people from across the industry. As mentioned, it's great to be joined on Fintech Insider Focus by Pranav Sud, GM for EMEA at Airwallex. How are you today? [00:04:56] S3: I am very well, David. Thank you for having me on the show. [00:05:00] S2: Awesome. It's a pleasure. So for our international audience, can you give us a little bit of an overview about yourself and your background?
00:05:00 · David Barton-Grimley, Pranav Sood
[00:05:00] S2: Awesome. It's a pleasure. So for our international audience, can you give us a little bit of an overview about yourself and your background? [00:05:07] S3: Yeah. Absolutely. So as as mentioned at the beginning, I run our business across EMEA. So we have offices in in London, in Amsterdam, and in Vilnius, in in Lithuania. I'm responsible for everything we do in in in market, both commercially, but also non commercially. I've been here about a year. And before that, I was actually another business called GoCardless for around five years, working on a bunch of stuff, both in terms of our strategy and international expansion. So we are a fintech platform for global businesses. We help our customers to get paid, to manage their treasury, and also to send and spend money around the world. We serve businesses of all sizes. So the very small end of town, we're looking after ecommerce businesses or digital services or SaaS platforms. But we're also working with some of the biggest companies in the world. So you can think about Xero or Qantas or, you know, Sheehan, for example, as some of our more enterprise customers. We were founded in Australia, and I know we'll talk about that probably a bit later on today. But we're now a very global company with 1,300 people around the world, 19 offices, doing, you know, roughly $50,000,000,000 annualized in in volume, but growing well north of 100% year over year. And so still in a very, very rapid phase of our expansion.
00:06:24 · David Barton-Grimley
[00:06:24] S2: Fantastic. Right. Let's jump in. So, yep, as you said, you guys were founded in Australia, and this is our APAC focus episode. And, you know, payments in APAC and around the world has been growing massively over the last few years. It'd be great to talk a little bit about what gap in the market Airwallex founders see, and how they approached it in that founding story.