Innovate Finance
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?
00:10:15 · Pranav Sood
[00:10:15] S1: Yeah. It's it's actually... As you say, it's a really rare thing to be expanding westwards. I don't know that many businesses that have started in APAC and then come to Europe and The US. Usually the other way around that people tend to tend to go, tend to see. So that's actually a super interesting experience to be to be living through right right now. We have a great business in The UK already. We've been here for about eighteen months. I've got a team here in in London of about 70. They are already serving lots of customers. I gave you, you know, one example. I could also talk about people like Plum. Many of your listeners will know them as a as a fintech. There are many, many others that we've that we've been able to serve over the last year or so. As a result, the business has grown really quickly. We found a lot of confidence and we found a lot of, you know, predictability in the places that we can solve problems. And so we're excited about continuing to scale that. Now, of course, we're also looking at the EU. We already have an office in The Netherlands. We also have an office in Lithuania and Vilnius. And, you know, as we look into 2023, we will be expanding selectively into the European Union. We're really excited about Benelux. There's a lot... We have a lot of customers, a lot of traction there already. We also think there are interesting opportunities in some of the other continental European markets that we're continuing to explore. The other one that we're very interested in is actually Israel. So we already serve a number of Israeli companies. So people like Papaya Global is one example. Some of your listeners may know them as a payroll software provider. We help them with their payouts and with their, you know, their need to help their customers move money around the world. And even... I was in Tel Aviv actually a couple of weeks ago with Jack. Even in the course of a couple of days, we met literally tens of CEOs and founders who were excited about the ability to actually simplify the movement of money globally. And I think Israel, as anyone who's been there will know really well, is a default global economy. They're always looking for opportunities to expand internationally. So that's definitely something that resonates with us. I was gonna say more broadly for Airwallex. Of course, you know, we're president in The US.
00:12:21 · Pranav Sood, Veronica Glab
We have a, you know, physical presence in San Francisco. We're working with a lot of very exciting customers already. Not too many that I can share the logos of just yet, but in three or four months, I think we'll be able to give you some quite exciting news. And then, of course, continuing to grow, you know, both looking at The Americas, but also into Asia as well where we already have a lot of geographical presence and and strength. [00:12:45] S0: Wow. You guys are really growing very quickly. And it's not just in terms of the geographic expansion as well, but I do know that you've raised a really successful series e. So kind of coming from your vantage point of such a successfully growing and scaling company, what are some of the advice or best practices that you would give to earlier stage startups who are looking to scale at the same level?