The Airwallex Podcast
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.
00:09:30 · Jack Zhang, Shannon Scott
[00:09:30] S0: Yeah. And think about it, like, if you actually run this not just in one country, run it in many countries, and how disjoint that's going be. Say if you're using Concur or Ramp in The US, and using a PLEO in Europe, or using another software in Australia, and you have all these different entities that you have to worry about, how do you actually creating this holistic view to run your business autonomously with AI? They're just impossible. And the better way to do that is using a single platform to consolidating all your financial operations globally so that you can see all the money and money out to have all the workflow set up in a single platform so you don't have to worry [00:10:08] S1: about it. And then you can see that full lineage. You don't have to worry about sort of like like risk issues or perhaps like, like, any changes happening off system because you can see the lineage all the way from the vendor through the approval flows. Maybe there's a funds transfer in the middle and and then and then the payout actually happens. [00:10:23] S0: Yeah. And the the beauty of that is not just global, but also the vertical integration between the AI [00:10:27] S1: and the software and the infrastructure. If we talk about infrastructure for a minute, like like, how deep does it go?
00:10:27 · Shannon Scott, Jack Zhang
[00:10:27] S1: and the software and the infrastructure. If we talk about infrastructure for a minute, like like, how deep does it go? [00:10:33] S0: Well, we started the the business by building the best money movement infrastructure because money movement is the most primitive financial infrastructure in the world. Right? It doesn't matter what services you provide in financial services, you need to move the money. Building the best money mover infrastructure will kind of give us that kind of best foundation to extend that into payment acceptance and also bill pay and then sort of spend and pay out. But more importantly, that we have this multi currency infrastructure that allow you to process in transactions in over 180 countries around the world. In all these local currencies, you don't have to worry about getting charged three, 4% of hidden FX fees. Once the money come in, you can have all this visibility of these currencies in your wallet, and you're converting these currencies either manually or autonomously with kind of interbank rate with a small fee. And then you can manage all your spend on the platform as well. You have money movement infrastructure integrated with bill pay or payroll when using the software, and it's fully vertically integrated with your ERP as well, you don't have to worry about any manual reconciliation.