Innovate Finance
00:00:00 · Veronica Glab, Pranav Sood
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Coffee with Innovate Finance, our podcast series where we speak to industry leaders on financial innovation and fintech. Our podcasts are available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Podcasts. I'm Veronica Glab, Head of Engagement, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Pranav Sudh, General Manager of EMEA at Airwallets. Pranav, thank you for joining us. [00:00:27] S1: Thanks for having me. [00:00:29] S0: Alright. Well, Pranav, can you tell us a little bit more about your background? [00:00:33] S1: Absolutely. So, as you mentioned, I run Airwallex's business across EMEA. I've been doing that job since April of this year. And prior to that, I spent nearly five years at another fintech, a business called GoCardless, where I did a whole range of different things ranging from international expansion through to the last two and a half years running our SME business globally. I started my career in consulting, so I spent the first four or five years working for a firm called Bain. I worked in in London across Asia and and and elsewhere. I think the the short version of that is I made a lot of slides. [00:01:08] S0: Fair enough. And can you tell us what made you want to join Airwallex?
00:01:13 · Pranav Sood
[00:01:13] S1: Yeah. Sure. I I think it's probably worth just introducing Airwallex as well, and I'm sure many of your listeners may not have heard of us before. We're a fintech platform for global businesses. So we built the infrastructure, the APIs, and the software that enable businesses of all sizes to move money around the world, whether it's collecting payments, whether it's holding and converting funds, or whether it's paying it out around the world as well. We made it super simple and super cost effective for businesses to do. So when I was first approached about the opportunity to work at Airwallex, I really didn't understand the power of what we did or what we could do. And so the reason that I was excited about it was because the first person I met was actually Jack, who's now my boss. And in the course of an hour or so conversation, he told me the full range of things that the product is capable of of doing. And he helped me to understand the scale and scope of the problem that we're able to solve. So for me, as I thought about, you know, why should I join this company? Why should I take this step? There were two or three themes that I kept on coming back to. The first was the superpowers of the product itself. You know, the infrastructure, the licenses, the APIs, the developer kit... Toolkits, all that kind of stuff that really coming from a fintech background, I know how hard it is to build. The second is this is a super global business. So we're, you know, we're 1,100 people around the world in 19 offices. We have businesses in APAC, across Europe, in The UK, and also in The US as well. And for me, that's incredibly exciting because it gives you that opportunity to learn about doing business and also work with people from all of those different places. And I think the last thing as well was just the quality and the caliber of the people that I'm able to work with and got the chance to meet. So if I look at my leadership team in EMEA and if I look at our leadership team around the world, I see people who've demonstrated success in building businesses all over the all over the world. So whether it's people from Stripe or Revolut or Deliveroo or Uber, you know, these are people who have seen what it takes to scale a company and go from zero to one to 10 to a 100.
00:03:22 · Pranav Sood, Veronica Glab
And for me, that's really energizing because it inspires me every day to, you know, raise my level and also learn from them and and see what I can take away. So product, you know, opportunity in the global nature of our business, and then the people as well as what what brought me here. [00:03:39] S0: Alright. Well, speaking of energizing, I noticed you've got a cup of coffee in your hand. So I think this might be literally our first coffee with innovate finance episode with actual coffee on it. Do you wanna tell me what's in your cup and how that connects to the Airwallex founding story?
00:03:55 · Pranav Sood
[00:03:55] S1: I'm aware that your listeners are not gonna be able to see this, so they won't be able to appreciate how wonderfully Airwallex branded my cup is. But I'm going to let you down and tell you that it's actually not a coffee. It's a it's a peppermint tea. So I've had my daily dose of caffeine. And if I have any more, I think I probably won't be able to go to sleep. But it's a it's a good question about our our founding and our origin because coffee is really quite deeply ingrained in the origin story of this business. So for anyone who doesn't know, the business was set up by a bunch of friends from Melbourne University in Australia in Melbourne. And it was set up because they were actually trying to build a coffee company in a coffee shop. And in the process... So the company... The the shop's called Tuck and Co. It actually still exists in Melbourne to this day. It's... I've been there myself. They do make really good coffee. I can I can attest to that? But in the process of setting up that coffee shop, they were exposed to the crazy complexity of doing business globally. So imagine when you're trying to set up a coffee shop, you got to buy cups, you got to buy beans, you got to figure out how to, you know, pay suppliers, you got to potentially have customers who are coming from different places as well. And as a consequence of that, you really quickly have to get to grips with all of these different ways of paying and being paid, you know, the complexity of converting funds, the the complexity of, you know, dealing with different workflows and different bits of software. And in the process of doing that, our our our cofounders, so Jack, Max, Lucy, you know, Xu Jing as well, they just thought, god, there must be a better way to do this. And so the coffee company carried on. The coffee shop carried on as as I said, but they moved to what I think is a much much bigger and and probably far naughtier problem space, which is how do we actually fix the business of managing and moving money globally?
00:05:41 · Veronica Glab
[00:05:41] S0: Alright. Well, payments is actually quite a crowded market and there's a lot of players operating and providing similar services to you. So other than the coffee, what makes Airwall looks different?
00:05:54 · Pranav Sood
[00:05:54] S1: It's a great question. And I think what makes it... Makes our products special, you know, our superpowers, it begins with infrastructure. So at the most fundamental level, Airwallex is an infrastructure company. We have built what I think is an incredible layer of licenses and rails around the world, which allow our customers to access local payments, access different forms of you know, payment method method... Methods, access different currencies, access different ways and places of creating virtual accounts and and wallets, and knitted all of that stuff together into really coherent and easy to use product. So anyone who knows fintech will know that although we have a global financial system, it's incredibly fragmented. And almost every bit of it doesn't really speak to every other bit. What Airwallex has done at its most fundamental level is build infrastructure that ties that all together. And so just to just to make it real for you, Veronica, so people probably will know about Swift. It's been in the news a lot this year. There's been a lot, you know, about how we've excluded Russia and and things like that. Swift is a very archaic way of sending money around the world. It's a messaging protocol, but it's basically short form for the correspondent banking networks that exist. You think about Airwallex, the power of what we've built is that we now have a network which allows our customers to bypass Swift. So if you look at the transactions that go through our Walletx, about 93, 94% of them bypass Swift entirely, and they go through local rails. That, for me, is the crux of what makes us special. It's that infrastructure layer at the core. Now on top of that, of course, you can build the APIs. You can build the software. You can, you know, build the whole stack of tools. But if you don't have the infra, if you're not close to the metal, it's really hard to be different. And so what makes us special, what gives us that superpower, it's the infrastructure that we've got. It's the breadth, it's the depth, and it's the the quality as well that we're able to offer to our customers.