Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
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.
00:09:00 · Pranav Sood, David Barton-Grimley
And it means if you're not a specialist in the field as a business, even as a very large enterprise, even as a Qantas or a Xero or whoever, you can very quickly get lost. And so Airwallex is basically here to cut through that and to make it easy, transparent, and cost effective for for businesses to be able to manage and move their money around the world. [00:09:21] S2: And I imagine each country, you know, within APAC and, in fact, around the world has its own complexities. And so it must be an extremely complex thing to scale a business. I'd love to talk a little bit about, you know, maybe the one thing listeners should know about Airwallex's growth from Australia into APAC and across into EMEA.
00:09:21 · David Barton-Grimley, Pranav Sood
[00:09:21] S2: And I imagine each country, you know, within APAC and, in fact, around the world has its own complexities. And so it must be an extremely complex thing to scale a business. I'd love to talk a little bit about, you know, maybe the one thing listeners should know about Airwallex's growth from Australia into APAC and across into EMEA. [00:09:41] S3: I think probably the one thing is just that it's been really fast. So we're a we're a company that was born just around seven years ago. We really spent the first couple of years of our life building some of the infrastructure. So we're really an infrastructure product at heart. And infrastructure for us means licenses. It means integrations with schemes, you know, with with with banks and also with, you know, with with rails directly as well in some cases. And so we spent the first couple of years just building out some of that infrastructure layer around the world. And then in the last three or four years, we've gone from not much to $200,000,000 plus in in annualized revenue. And as I mentioned, $50,000,000,000 of volume and growing very, very quickly. And so that, you know, that is probably the key thing, which is we've really, really, really built something quickly. And we've built that from Australia, but now across APAC, you know, into EMEA, which is the part of the business that I'm responsible for, and also into The Americas now as well where we're seeing more and more success serving some massive companies, you know, the likes of... And Ivan, you know, formerly TripActions just being just being one example.
00:09:41 · Pranav Sood, David Barton-Grimley
[00:09:41] S3: I think probably the one thing is just that it's been really fast. So we're a we're a company that was born just around seven years ago. We really spent the first couple of years of our life building some of the infrastructure. So we're really an infrastructure product at heart. And infrastructure for us means licenses. It means integrations with schemes, you know, with with with banks and also with, you know, with with rails directly as well in some cases. And so we spent the first couple of years just building out some of that infrastructure layer around the world. And then in the last three or four years, we've gone from not much to $200,000,000 plus in in annualized revenue. And as I mentioned, $50,000,000,000 of volume and growing very, very quickly. And so that, you know, that is probably the key thing, which is we've really, really, really built something quickly. And we've built that from Australia, but now across APAC, you know, into EMEA, which is the part of the business that I'm responsible for, and also into The Americas now as well where we're seeing more and more success serving some massive companies, you know, the likes of... And Ivan, you know, formerly TripActions just being just being one example. [00:10:45] S2: That's phenomenal growth. On our panel discussion show, we were talking to Revolut and U Trip about how interconnected travel, money movement, and financial services are in APAC. What what's your or Air Wallach's view on the complexities of global money movement? I mean, you you began to allude to it there.