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.
00:07:51 · Veronica Glab, Pranav Sood
[00:07:51] S0: So I see your adverts on the tube every day on my commute. So what products and services do you offer specifically? And going a little more beyond that, are there any new products that are in the pipeline? [00:08:01] S1: It's a great question. And the way to think about our our business is that we can solve two sets of problems for our customers. The first is for themselves and the way that they're managing their own money and their own financial operations. The second is for their customers. So to give you an example, on the first side, you could be an e commerce store or a a or a kind of fashion brand that's looking to expand globally. I'll give you a good example. Me and M, which is a high end theme... Kind of women's wear brand, which some of your listeners may have heard of. My my wife certainly has, which is just to to her benefit. [00:08:36] S0: Sorry. I know them too. No.
00:08:38 · Pranav Sood
[00:08:38] S1: So they expanded into The US. And before they started working with Airwallex, they were struggling with the complexity and the cost of having to deal with multiple currencies and basically settling funds in USD into an account that was forcing them to convert. We're saving them tons of money and tons of time by giving them access to a virtual account in The US that they can settle into directly and therefore save themselves that that cost. So on the on the one end of the spectrum, you've got businesses like that who are using our tools and our and our and our products to solve their own financial problems. On the other, you've got a whole bunch of businesses who are using our our products to build financial products for their customers. And that's where it gets really interesting because that's basically embedded finance. And it's saying, hey, look, you wanna use... You wanna offer a financial product or a service, but you don't wanna go through the pain and the hassle of getting the licenses, building the infrastructure, and worrying about basically becoming, you know, a fintech product. So how do you do that? Well, actually, you can partner with someone like Airwallex and work with us and and leverage our infrastructure and our work to do so. So a great example of that would be a business like Qantas, for example, in in Australia, who, you know, as everyone would know, is an airline. They're not a fintech, but they want to offer a financial product without having to to worry about the licensing and the regulation that comes with it.
00:09:58 · Veronica Glab
[00:09:58] S0: Alright. And going on a little bit to the business side. Airwallex started in Australia, had a very successful expansion westwards and has now made it to The UK. How's the business doing here in The UK and are there any plans for further international expansion?