The MoneyPot
00:00:04 · Rachel Morrissey, Pranav Sood
[00:00:04] S0: Welcome to the Money Pot. This is Rachel Morrissey, and I am here with Mehdi Soodhi, who is with our Asia team. And we are so excited because we're coming to you live from the Amsterdam show. So when you're listening to this, yes, it was recorded in front of a live studio audience. And we have today with us, we have Pranav Sud, and he is from AirWallax. So first, let's talk about that. What do you do with AirWallax? [00:00:32] S1: Absolutely. Well, firstly, thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure to to be part of, money 2020 and and to be able to contribute to the ecosystem. Airwallex is a fintech and payments platform for global businesses. We help our customers to collect money, to hold money, to convert money, and send and spend money around the world. We serve small businesses, but we also serve some of the biggest platforms in the world. So customers include people like Shein, but also Qantas, and many, many other very significant businesses. We're about seven, eight years old, so came out of Melbourne in Australia originally. And we've been here in EMEA for about three years. I run our businesses here across the region, primarily out of The UK where we have about 70 people, but we also have offices in in Amsterdam, in Vilnius, in Lithuania, and as of a few weeks ago, in Tel Aviv as well. [00:01:25] S0: I was just gonna say, I heard about you opening your office in Tel Aviv. Congratulations on that. So I wanna go ahead and bring Mehdi in because I wanna make sure that we share this. So Mehdi, go ahead. Let's go ahead and start with you.
00:01:25 · Rachel Morrissey, Medhy Souidi
[00:01:25] S0: I was just gonna say, I heard about you opening your office in Tel Aviv. Congratulations on that. So I wanna go ahead and bring Mehdi in because I wanna make sure that we share this. So Mehdi, go ahead. Let's go ahead and start with you. [00:01:40] S2: One of my questions for you is you joined the company one year ago. What was the challenges for you in terms of how to implement the partnerships in EMEA and what was the learnings you get from here?
00:01:40 · Medhy Souidi, Pranav Sood
[00:01:40] S2: One of my questions for you is you joined the company one year ago. What was the challenges for you in terms of how to implement the partnerships in EMEA and what was the learnings you get from here? [00:01:52] S1: Yeah, so I joined Airwallex, as you mentioned, about a year ago. I'd actually been in fintech for quite a few years before that. Was with a business called GoCardless. I spent about five years there from 2017 through to 2022. And so fintech as an area is not a new area to me, but Airwallex as a business is obviously one that I'm still getting to to know. We scale our product in lots of different ways. Some of our customers are SMEs, so they might be e com companies who are buying and selling across borders. Others are much, much bigger and more sophisticated buyers of fintech products and services. And so we have a whole bunch of different ways that we scale. Part of it is working with partners, of course. So people like Xero, for example, we collaborate very closely with on the SME side. But we're actually also out there, particularly coming to events like this and meeting some of the larger customers more on a one to one basis as well. And it's been a very successful strategy. We've been able to announce some fantastic customers. So in the last few weeks, people like Trulayer, Modify also in the fintech space. And then even in Israel, were talking about a minute ago, we're working with people like Papaya Global, OurCrowd, and and many others as well.
00:02:58 · Rachel Morrissey
[00:02:58] S0: Great. That's wonderful. I just wanted to... I know that today we wanted to talk about programmatic money and basically how we can utilize, you guys are utilizing that to help SMEs scale for cross borders. And so I wanted to start there a little bit because, there's programmable money, which is a different thing a little bit. So let's talk about what programmatic money is and how that is thought about by Airwallex. So I'm gonna let you define that first.
00:03:27 · Pranav Sood
[00:03:27] S1: Yeah. Let's start with the problem space. So you're an SME, let's take an example. I've got a backpack here actually, which was one of our customers has made it. The company's called July, it sells, they're fantastic by the way, so big shout out to them. They sell the kind of backpacks that people who travel too much always have with loads of compartments and so on. Now, the reason I'm telling you about these guys is because they're quite, symbolic in some ways of the challenges that businesses like them are facing. So they will be buying products from all over the world, in order to make the backpacks that they make. They'll be selling those backpacks online to customers all over the world as well. And as a consequence of that, they face a bunch of really quite significant challenges. One is that they are having to transform the money that they're collecting from their customers into the money that they are using their settlement money. The second is that having to then pay out from that money to their suppliers all around the world. And they're trying to do both of those two things in a really cost effective way. They're also trying to do it in a way that doesn't require tonnes of humans to be constantly looking reconciliation and costs and so on. And so that's where someone like Airwallex comes in, where we can say to them, hey, look, you know, we can give you access to the global financial infrastructure that you need at a really transparent and competitive price point. And we allow you to use it in a very simple and, as you mentioned, programmatic way. So for us, programmatic means you can do things at scale through simple either API or even UI, I mean, web app type UIs that allow you to be able to tackle your needs without having to build the manual processes or the human resources to to have to fulfill them. And so that's where that's where Airwallex comes in.
00:05:02 · Medhy Souidi, Rachel Morrissey, Pranav Sood
[00:05:02] S2: You just shared with us the macro view, but do you have, like, any successful use case that you can share with us who make you proud or make Airwallex very proud? [00:05:09] S0: I mean, other than July that you already gave the shout out to. [00:05:12] S1: Yeah, I mean, we work with loads of e commerce businesses globally. I think that use case is just quite symptomatic of many others that we operate in. I mean, in The UK, for example, one that I really like is a company called Young Goat. They're a streetwear brand. They sell really cool t shirts and stuff that I say are really cool. My younger sister would probably think are horrific, but I think they're really trendy. And they have exactly the same problem. They're getting these t shirts and their clothing manufactured around the world, they're selling online, their payment provider had been forcing them to convert into a particular currency. And so every single time they fall into this conversion trap where your money is being transformed into a currency that you settle in, and then you're having to convert it again. And so each time you're paying two to 4% more than you should be for something that we could do for a way, way, way more transparent and competitive rate.