00:00:00 · Jack Zhang, Shannon Scott
[00:00:00] S0: Airwallet helps you set up a bank account globally. It will help you to set up your payment acceptance globally. It will help you to set up your integration with accounting and ERP. Essentially, it's like a single platform to help solve all your financial problem. With kind of the infrastructure and software build now with kind of AI on top, so we're building AI agent to solve all these different sort of financial operations problem. It's an intelligent partner for you to be empowered to get insight, to get a deep understanding of every single detail of your business, but also you can take a step back to ask for recommendations on how to do better, so that you can focus on what's more important, which is achieving the goal and the mission of your business. We're ten years in, and we are just getting started. Hey, everyone. I'm Jack Dend, the CEO and co founder of Airwallex, and we are building the future of global banking. [00:00:53] S1: Hey, Jack. Great to be here with you. I'm Shannon. I'm the head of product at Airwallex. Welcome to the podcast. Look forward to it. I joined Airwallex, when was that? Early twenty twenty, so in my sixty year now. It's really interesting to reflect on why I joined. And companies that are really going deep to solve genuinely difficult problems, such as how do you actually disrupt financial systems that are so heavily regulated. I think if you can move the needle on those types of problems, you can have this sort of tremendous outside impact over a ten year or horizon beyond this.
00:00:53 · Shannon Scott, Jack Zhang
[00:00:53] S1: Hey, Jack. Great to be here with you. I'm Shannon. I'm the head of product at Airwallex. Welcome to the podcast. Look forward to it. I joined Airwallex, when was that? Early twenty twenty, so in my sixty year now. It's really interesting to reflect on why I joined. And companies that are really going deep to solve genuinely difficult problems, such as how do you actually disrupt financial systems that are so heavily regulated. I think if you can move the needle on those types of problems, you can have this sort of tremendous outside impact over a ten year or horizon beyond this. [00:01:29] S0: Yeah. That's a super exciting topic today. Gonna talk about all the amazing stuff we've built in Airwallex in the last decade and what we're looking forward to build in the next decade. [00:01:38] S1: Super excited to chat with you. Let's do it. Hey. I wanna keep it really easy to to get started. So maybe a non Everest question to start with. What's your favorite podcast and why? [00:01:49] S0: I definitely have to say 20 VC, that by Harry Stabbing. And Harry is not only one of the most famous podcasters for the investment community, but also is a dear friend, and he loves sort of walking in Hyde Park while having a conversation, so I really, really sort of enjoyed that, and you know, just his energy level, his insight is is amazing.
00:01:49 · Jack Zhang, Shannon Scott
[00:01:49] S0: I definitely have to say 20 VC, that by Harry Stabbing. And Harry is not only one of the most famous podcasters for the investment community, but also is a dear friend, and he loves sort of walking in Hyde Park while having a conversation, so I really, really sort of enjoyed that, and you know, just his energy level, his insight is is amazing. [00:02:12] S1: For me, I'd have to say the Acquired podcast with Dave Rosenthal and and Ben Gilbert. As a product manager, I just learned so much. I learned so much about how these great companies have been established and and sort of how they're evolving and and the expectations for the future. And I think for Airwallex, just thinking about where we're gonna go in the next ten years, I'm... I I wanna be one of their stories in [00:02:32] S0: the next generation. What's your... What's the favorite episode? [00:02:36] S1: Most recently, just learning about Google's work in AI. It's like a narrative that's playing out right now with what's happening in AI and and the players and and what we're gonna see into the future. And so super impressed with the content they covered in AI. [00:02:50] S0: Yeah. Actually listened to that one as well. It's an amazing podcast. Yeah. I I really enjoyed it. [00:02:58] S1: Jack, why did you start AI, Alex?
00:02:58 · Shannon Scott, Jack Zhang
[00:02:58] S1: Jack, why did you start AI, Alex? [00:02:59] S0: About ten years ago, I invested in the coffee business, and Max, our co founder and head of design, is actually operating in that coffee business, and his name is on the OFAC playlist. I mean, clearly it's not him, he's sort of with the same name. And every time he's borrowing money to pay for coffee beans, because we're roasting our own beans to Brazil or Indonesia, and the money just disappears for a couple of weeks and then bounces back out of nowhere. And he kind of often complained about it, also the high cost of FX, you know, we were using Western Union, were using some traditional banks, they would charge us 3%, 4% on FX to paying those vendors globally. I really kind of just curious about those problems and, you know, kind of just try to figure out if there's a better way to solve, you know, those frustrations. And that's kind of how AirWallet was born. We wanted to build the best money mover infrastructure in the world. Then later on that kind of vision expands, building the future of global banking. [00:04:14] S1: How did you know that you were going to shift from just sort of helping the coffee business run more effectively and solve those problems, versus recognizing this is a problem that I need to solve for all businesses?
00:04:14 · Shannon Scott, Jack Zhang
[00:04:14] S1: How did you know that you were going to shift from just sort of helping the coffee business run more effectively and solve those problems, versus recognizing this is a problem that I need to solve for all businesses? [00:04:24] S0: I think it's really thinking about in the shoes of entrepreneurs. And if you're an entrepreneur, you really just want to focus on running your business, achieving your vision. Don't want to worry about the headaches of financial operation, endless spreadsheet, reconciliation, tax, and cash flow, and forecasting, everything. And you want to have a platform and a partner to empower you to get all this insight, automating all this manual work, and ultimately help you to run your business without any sort of manual headaches. [00:05:08] S1: Yeah. None of those things you mentioned are about making coffee taste better. So [00:05:12] S0: Yeah. [00:05:13] S1: If if Airwollex can sort of, you know, scrolling forward, take that off a business' plate so they can just focus on their own business and making that successful, then on the product side, what can we do to help you actually achieve achieve that vision? [00:05:27] S0: I mean, the... If you're thinking about, you know, initially we wanted to build the best financial infrastructure to help, businesses like we started with a business account, but quickly we expanded to spend management and merchant acquiring onlineoffline checkout. And this essentially evolving to a single platform or you call like a financial operating system.
00:05:27 · Jack Zhang, Shannon Scott
[00:05:27] S0: I mean, the... If you're thinking about, you know, initially we wanted to build the best financial infrastructure to help, businesses like we started with a business account, but quickly we expanded to spend management and merchant acquiring onlineoffline checkout. And this essentially evolving to a single platform or you call like a financial operating system. [00:05:54] S1: So so when we talk about a financial operating system, it's obviously a very broad term. Under the hood, like, what does AOLX actually do? What problems are they solving for businesses as part of that operating system? [00:06:03] S0: Essentially, it's like a single platform to help solve all your financial problem. It's not just like a sort of a vertical solution or or like a a a silo solution to help you solve one problem, and you have to kind of plug in many point solutions together, and then to kind of have to worry about how everything is integrated. So this is like a single platform to help you to get your banking set up, get your expenses, spend management, corporate card all set up, get your payment acceptance set up globally, and then integrate it with the accounting platform that you literally just need Air Wallet to to run your business.