Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
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.
00:11:03 · Pranav Sood
[00:11:03] S3: Yeah. I... So I'm a historian by background. So I was actually a classicist at university. I I did Latin and Greek, and spent probably more time than was economically sensible writing about, you know, stuff like financial crisis in the Roman world. And the reason I tell you that is because I really love to put the work that we are doing into historical context. And so when I think about, you know, what is it that we're really doing, fundamentally, we're trying to solve a problem that everybody who's done business across borders has experienced going all the way back to the Egyptians, to the Romans, to the Medicis, to whoever, which is exactly what we were talking about a minute ago, which is in different countries, there are different regulatory regimes, different compliance regimes that you have to be able to navigate. Customers prefer to pay in different ways. So, you you look at Europe, for example, there are a bunch of bank to bank mechanisms that are prevalent in in in Benelux that just don't exist elsewhere. So ideal, so forth, etcetera. People aren't using those in France or in The UK, for example. People use different currencies. They acquire or they collect money in different currencies. They want to pay money in different currencies. So the combination of all of those things means that it is incredibly difficult for nonspecialists to navigate that environment. And the reality for for most businesses is that their core business is selling, you know, sneakers, for example, or or, you know, selling advertising or whatever it may well be. And the the whole managing their money bit of it is a kind of ancillary part that is more of a pain than than an area of, you know, joy for them as as business owners, operators, or executives. And so I think, you know, the interesting thing for us as a as a business coming out of APAC into into EMEA, into The US, is that we've been born in a region which is incredibly heterogeneous. And so, you know, you look at APAC as a region, it's not APAC as a kind of mean... Meaningless acronym because in reality, you've got all the different countries which all have their own local preferences, local currencies, you know, different super apps, whether you're looking at Grab or or WeChat or whatever with, you know, different behaviors that consumers and businesses are adopting around them.
00:13:13 · Pranav Sood, David Barton-Grimley
And so for us, our our kind of key thing is we've come out of an environment where we recognize and understand how important it is to be local, which means when we come to somewhere like EMEA, which is my patch, we're not thinking about, you know, EMEA as a region. We're thinking about The UK or Israel or The Netherlands and trying to to develop solutions and products for our customers that reflect their more local requirements rather than some kind of a generic view of of what customers in Europe may need. [00:13:42] S2: And it feels like that gives you a unique perspective, you know, going from a part of the world that is extremely complex to a part of the world that would you say, EMEA, I mean, as a... As an individual market or as a homogenous whole is more complex than APAC or simpler in some ways?