Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
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.
00:06:48 · Pranav Sood
[00:06:48] S3: Yeah. So anyone who's been to Melbourne and maybe a few people who haven't will know that people in Melbourne take coffee incredibly seriously. And coffee is actually the origin of of Airwallex. So the the founding story of this company is that our cofounders were operating a coffee shop. It's called Tuck and Co. It's actually still going, in Melbourne by, by Docklands. Actually quite nice. And in the process of setting up that coffee shop, they realized just how painful it was to try and manage, their money around the world. And so you can imagine if you're running a coffee shop, you need to buy beans probably from, you know, Latin America. You need to buy cups, you know, maybe you're buying them from from Asia somewhere. You probably need to, you know, buy other things and and and send money in in into other parts of the world. And so as they were doing that, they were wrestling with Western Union and banks and all the other legacy financial institutions that exist to move money around the world. And they realized this is really, really painful. And so Jack, who's our CEO now and one of our co founders, his background was actually previously as a as an engineer and a and a and a product person working within FX trading arms of investment banks. And so he worked for some of the bigger investment banks, the Australian ones and also global ones, helping them to build their FX engines and FX capabilities. And so the combination of that lived experiences, coffee entrepreneurs, and the background that that Jack had in the world of cross border money movement made them think, hey. There's actually a better way to to tackle this problem for modern global businesses. And so that was really the the kernel of the idea or the bean of the idea, if you'll excuse the pun, that gave, you know, gave birth to to Airwallex. And I think that theme has really been a recurrent one as we've, grown and expanded around the world, which is that, you know, moving money, managing money across borders is incredibly complicated. You have to deal with a myriad of different regulations of local preferences for, you know, payment schemes or payment methods of, you know, licensing requirements. And so all of that complexity compounds.