Cambrian Fintech with Rex Salisbury
00:03:59 · Jack Zhang
[00:03:59] S1: Yeah. We changed the direction of product twice early on in the journey between, you know, when we started the company in 2015 to 2017. So initially, we were basically trying to find a way to, you know, effectively moving money and trading our facts by ourselves just build... By building a network of participant. But we just couldn't really find a way to scale that two sided sort of marketplace, and we never really kind of took that, launched that product to the market. And the second product we built is really kind of an invoicing product so that sellers can send invoices globally to kinda get paid. And we basically cold called some of the investment banks, and and we were lucky that, you know, one of them and Macquarie Bank out of Australia that agreed to giving us liquidity from the Interbank. Then we build a fixed engine, you know, able to streaming price from from Macquarie. They were able to basically giving Interbank FX price to the retail customer. And that's kind of the initial sort of product that we built that we actually got a few 100 customers, the SMBs in Australia are selling globally, but we just couldn't get enough customers to scale. And we then build the API business to, you know, targeting larger ecommerce marketplaces and tuition provider to setting payments globally. That's kind of where we really got the initial part of MarketFed, and that's what help us to raise the Series B and, you know, also got the acquisition offer from the start.
00:05:41 · Rex Salisbury
[00:05:41] S0: Yep. So starting off with, you know, a 100 plus SMBs in Australia for FX, moving up into large scale marketplaces, but still focused on ecommerce tuition payments. And then talk about the journey you've been on since 2019 because you've now gone from FX into business banking accounts and building a whole new set of layers on top of that for, you know, spend, expense management, corporate card issuance, that those sorts of products. So just give us kind of the overview of of where Airwallex is.
00:06:09 · Jack Zhang
[00:06:09] S1: Yeah. So I think if you kind of roughly break down the journey of Airwallex, it's probably, I would say, three part. The first part is really focused on global money movement, whether it's sort of collecting money, currency conversions, paying out to to individuals or businesses globally, and then various sort of API driven selling to large enterprises and platforms that will cause kind of the phase one of the business. And then phase two, really, what we realized is as a in... As as a infrastructure provider, you're always facing margin compression, kind of competitions in a certain corridor with the local providers, and scalability issues. It just feels that we always sort of not able to control our own destiny. So then we kinda then enter to the phase two of the of the two businesses that we basically pivoted back again to our original idea of empowering SMBs to grow that business globally is with building application layer on top of our financial infrastructure, like global bank account, corporate cards, then sort of merchant acquiring, that we're able to acquiring this SMB directly become the one stop shop for these SMBs to help them to grow their business globally, to collecting the revenue, to help them to paying the vendors, suppliers, employees, and whatnot, and managing the treasury in the middle. And the phase three, I would say, is to start building the business operating system, which is the, you know, a bunch of software applications across expense management, bill pay, reimbursements, vendor management, procurement. And on the revenue side, it's like a billing, invoicing, you know, merchant record, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So... And now, you know, we can layer in AR on top of that. So that... I think that's kind of, like, which is sort of phase three of the company, which is building this free vertical integrated financial infrastructure plus business operating systems slash software plus AI. And, you know, we're kind of on that phase three right now. Not saying that the phase two and phase phase five, phase two is not helpful, but it just really build the foundation of the business. And and that kind of... We started building the software layer from 2019, and I think that proven to be one of the best decisions we made that we can fully leveraging the PowerAI to start building autonomous products.
00:08:38 · Jack Zhang, Rex Salisbury
And without kind of betting big on that decision today, we weren't able to to achieve so. [00:08:44] S0: Yep. And I also wanna back up all the way because you have a pretty interesting story about how you started Airwallex in the first place, and you've started a diverse array of businesses. So let's go all the way back to high school and talk about your very first job, and then can talk about some of the other businesses you started preceding Airwallex.
00:09:06 · Jack Zhang
[00:09:06] S1: Yeah. So I started my first business as, like, you know, like a student back then called Urban Exploration, where, obviously, nobody getting paid, and we we essentially wanna help the school to raise some money for student activities, but nobody really wanted to give us some money. And one of the merchant that... Or restaurant wanted to... Us to help them to send some flyers around that we... To to... So so that they can give us some money. We thought it's very ineffective and... Because nobody wanna take our flyers on the street. And we thought, why don't we create some content that, you know, so that student actually love to read and that that could be kinda more interesting if we can inserting these coupons or vouchers or ads into the into the into the magazine. Because the content we actually create are quite interesting, it's actually been viral in our city, and then we end up, you know, able to, you know, penetrating all the high schools in in my city, and we're able to onboard, like, a few thousand merchants and they're working with us. So we actually been quite profitable from day one, partly because, you know, none of the student getting paid and we're using the school's printer to print out this this this magazine for free. But we went out made decent income, you know, I think after after a year and a half and before I left the the country to to to move to Melbourne. But that's kind of the first real taste of success in in business, although it's not entirely a powerful business.
00:10:36 · Rex Salisbury, Jack Zhang
[00:10:36] S0: Yeah. And I also... I love that story, but I also love the story of the jobs that you worked in high school. So, like, why were you working the jobs, and what what were some of those? The lemon factory, I think, is an interesting story as well. [00:10:47] S1: Yeah. I worked in, you know, as a kitchen hand in the restaurant. I basically washing dishes and clean up oysters and, you know, I work in a in a volcano station, whatever you wanna call it, basically, doing deep frying, all sort of stuff and, around, post high school. And, then I went to work in a lemon factory after I graduated from high school before I went to college. And then I did a bartender job, you know, in... While I was in college. Normally, it's between sort of four to... 4PM to midnight, and I did work in a petrol station between midnight, 8AM so I can get paid a bit more. Not that I wanted to do all this. It's just that, you know, I lost financial support from my parents. You know, my dad lost his job, and then and I had to basically figure out a way to to live and... By myself and then pay a tuitions. You know, I had no choice but working all these sort of crazy hours and jobs throughout the college. [00:11:46] S0: Yeah. And some of your first businesses, I think post college, you had a wine and olive oil trading company and also a cafe in Melbourne. Curious to hear a little bit about those businesses, but then also how do you go from that to deciding that you wanna start something like Airwallex?