The Airwallex Podcast
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.
00:06:03 · Jack Zhang, Shannon Scott
[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. [00:06:39] S1: And so all of these services are effectively underpinned by the fact that you can operate globally. So holding many different currencies inside the wallet, If you're using payment acceptance and you're accepting funds from your customers around the world, they're paying in their payment methods, some of them are paying in euros, some are paying in USD, and it's all coming back into euros in your account. It's all going back into USD. There's no sort of forced FX conversion. If you have a supplier that then you're sort of paying out in euros, it's one to one. You don't have to worry about sort of bringing it all back to USD or or something similar. But some businesses are very complex, and so they have entities around the world. Like, how does that work when you're a business that's spread out like this?
00:07:15 · Jack Zhang
[00:07:15] S0: Well, when you have multiple entities around the world, you might have expenses in these local countries, and you might have revenue in local countries. So you need to receiving those payment, you need to making payments, whether it's payroll or vendor. So Airwallet built this awesome feature called Global Entity Management, essentially fully integrated with our business account and spend management or payment acceptance product, so that you can orchestrating these different business entities on a single platform to have full visibility on all the sort of payments coming in and payments going out onto this platform, and all these different currencies that are coming through to the platform as well. And next stage, we're actually building intelligence layer that powered by AI, that will help you to run those financial operations autonomously, whether it's approvals, workflows, you know, expenses, policy and billing, all these elements that you need to solve from a payments financial service point of view that you can rely on Airwallet to be your intelligence financial partner to to kind of automate your business.
00:08:24 · Shannon Scott
[00:08:24] S1: Yeah. So this is really interesting actually, because I think, like, I look at the sort of the early days of AOLX, we're building out the financial infrastructure. Like, we're investing a lot in the the licenses in different regions, the financial partners operating in those countries to basically bring together this network, different payment systems. We've got the payment acquiring side. I wanna talk more about that shortly. We've got the card issuing, but but more and more investing a lot in building on the on the software side. So you talked about sort of managing spend. You talked about, like, on... If you're on the receivable side, there's billing software as well. What's really interesting for me is... Well, actually, there's so many interesting things about this. But when you talked about AI, the spend software really helps establish context, context on what you're doing with your financial transaction. If you if you have one system over here that's managing your vendors and then you have another system separately that actually allows you to make a payment to a to a vendor, you're not really sure why that payment's happening. It's just, you know, it's being downloaded, it's being reuploaded, or somebody's sort of swivel sharing from one product to the next. But if you have that context together, you really understand who this business is, who their vendors are, which industry they're operating in, and this gives so much more context for, you know, new technologies to a... For, like, AI.