The MoneyPot
00:06:03 · Rachel Morrissey
[00:06:03] S0: Okay. But we're gonna get deeper into the financial side of this, but this is very interesting to me on the ecommerce side alone because as as we know with social media coming in in the whole Web 2.1 thing, right, it kind of created groups or tribes that didn't have the same kind of borders. Right? We no longer shop at a local store and just you happen to run into it. Right? So now they're finding their audience. Like you said, you think they're really cool. Your sister thinks they're And if that if that, you know, was the only... They were only available to be seen by a small group of people, you never know where that would fall. But by being able to find their audience globally, they don't have to have a giant audience to be successful. They just have to find the right audience to be successful. And that's really interesting that it could be cross border now, and you don't have to think about it being so limited or think about growth in the same way as, like, you have to make a group of people all in the same area. Love you. Right? You can find your people. Anyway, sorry. I wanted to go further into the the financial side, but I I just wanted to... That really struck me with what you're doing.
00:07:14 · Pranav Sood, Rachel Morrissey
[00:07:14] S1: I think that's a really interesting prompt, because, yes, the Internet, social media, shopping platforms allow you to be able to sell your product around the world and and without borders, but they also create a whole bunch of additional challenges that you need to navigate. So for example, you're selling a product to customers in The Eurozone, in The US, in Singapore, wherever. Those customers want to pay in different currencies. They may want to use different payment methods. So in The Eurozone, for example, we're in The Netherlands today, payment methods like ideal are massive. Now you try going to The US and telling someone to pay via ideal, they'll laugh at you. And so when you're dealing with those challenges of scale as a a as a scaling business, you need a partner who's able to help you to navigate the right currencies, the right payment methods, the right checkout, you know, orientation, and then crucially, pair that with settlement into the currencies that you actually need and payouts so that you can do everything in a single place. And for us, that's what we're really proud of, which is we've built the infrastructure. We've gone really deep, got the licenses, integrated with the banks, you know, integrated with the schemes. And so we're able to give our customers that end to end stack. That means that they can focus on selling t shirts and we can focus on doing payments. [00:08:32] S0: Right. As I always say, bakers get in to bake. They don't get into bank. [00:08:36] S1: That's quite right.
00:08:36 · Pranav Sood, Medhy Souidi
[00:08:36] S1: That's quite right. [00:08:39] S2: I would like to ask you a question because Airwalex was created in Australia and after this move to Hong Kong, go global in Asia, and now you have also the office here. Do you see on that kind of money movement a difference? You touch it a bit here, but I would like to go on a deep dive. Do you see like a very difference on how people use your platforms in Asia and in Europe, for example? And do you see like some trends for money movement in Europe or in Asia that are very different from each other?
00:09:07 · Pranav Sood
[00:09:07] S1: So I think the, yes, of course, there are differences in the rails and in the payment preferences that you see across borders, but there's a lot of consistency in the actual use cases themselves. So fundamentally, you need a financial operating system to be able to manage your money in, your treasury, your FX and your money out. And people may choose different rails in and they may choose different rails out, but the core of the use case is very similar. Similarly, we were talking a lot about the SME side of our business. We also have a big platform side of our business as well. I mentioned Sheehan as a good example of a customer like that in e commerce. They're about as far on the other end of the spectrum of scale as you can get from a mom and pop shop selling t shirts or candles online. And they have similar problems. They're trying to optimize for their authorization rate performance. They're trying to make sure that they can have redundancy and diversification in their stack, but they don't want to go and build 20 different infrastructure solutions to accommodate that. So I think in answer to the first part of your question, yes, of course, there are differences in preferences. But I think in terms of the actual core use cases, there's a lot of replicability, which is part of the reason why we've been able to scale so quickly. In terms of then the trends and what are we seeing, I think, again, there's quite a lot of consistency in the trends that we're seeing across both Asia, The US, and also here in EMEA as well. A couple of big ones that are coming up, and I'm sure your other guests have talked about this as well. But number one, people looking for diversification in their financial stack, whether that's from an acquiring perspective, whether it's from actually more of a banking perspective in light of of what happened with SVB and and what's been happening across The US with some of the community banks. Number two is that kind of ironic, but, I think, also valid combination of things. So people are looking to diversify. They're also looking to consolidate. And lots of CFOs, lots of chief product officers have woken up and of seen that their buyers have gone out and acquired 10 different fintech services over the last ten months.
00:11:07 · Pranav Sood, Medhy Souidi
And now suddenly when they're looking at cost consciousness and margin, they don't necessarily see the value in having all of those. So people like us who can do everything suddenly come into our own. And then I think the third thing that we're seeing a lot of is the embedded finance side of things. And it's really two aspects. So one is bundling. You know, increasingly, software businesses are finding it harder and harder to defend their margins and to grow their user bases. And so being able to bring in financial services on top of software becomes very compelling. You know, a great example of that is Papaya Global. They've done a fantastic job of of this. They're, you know, at heart, a payment software business, but they've very successfully integrated payments and money movement into their proposition, which makes their their use case much, much more compelling for the people that they're selling to. The other piece is, of course, in expansion into new services or new service lines. And, of course, everybody wants to have the the maximum wallet share of the customers. It's very difficult to have that because, you know, there's there's only so much wallet to go go around. But from our perspective as an infrastructure provider, we're delighted to be able to power those use cases because we think it's a great fit, and it makes great use of all of the regulatory licensing and payments infrastructure that we've got and built. [00:12:23] S2: Very interesting.
00:12:23 · Medhy Souidi, Rachel Morrissey
[00:12:23] S2: Very interesting. [00:12:24] S0: I was struck by what you just said about the nature of of this consolidation going on. When you're looking at this... I mean, obviously, Airwalks is in a really good position for this, but you also have a number of partners that you work with. So when you are looking at partners and you're trying to figure out where to go or what to do, what are the kinds of things that you key into? Because as fintech partnerships grow, you're going to either see mergers and acquisitions in this area, or you're going to see, really intense partnerships. And so I'm just curious, what is it you are digging into there?