The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
00:00:03 · S0, Shameer Sachdev, Pranav Sood
[00:00:03] S0: Welcome to the FML podcast, a podcast on a mission to uncover actionable insights, explore the latest trends, and to catalyze your fintech's growth. Join GrowthGorilla's founder and managing director, Shamir Sajdev, and some of fintech's hardest hitting marketers and leaders. [00:00:28] S1: Welcome everyone today. On today's episode of the FML podcast. I'm joined by Pranav Sudh, GM of EMEA at Airwallex. Pranav, thanks for joining us today. [00:00:38] S2: Thanks so much for having me. [00:00:40] S1: Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey so far at Airwallex?
00:00:45 · Pranav Sood
[00:00:45] S2: Absolutely. So going all the way back to the beginning, I first generation immigrant, born in India, moved over to The UK as a kid. I defied all of my parents' expectations by going and studying classics at university, which is about as far away as you can get from what Indian parents want you to do as a firstborn child. I somehow convinced the good people at Bain and Company to take a chance on me. And so I spent the first few years of my career making slides and living in suitcases as consultants typically do. And like a lot of consultants, after a few years of that, I got to a point where I realized that actually I didn't want to do quite so much of the telling other people to do stuff. I wanted to do a little bit more of the doing it myself. And so moved over into the wonderful world of fintech, joined a business called GoCardless, which I hope many of your listeners will be aware of. Initially, I joined to help Hiroki both with biz ops and strategy, but also to do some of the international expansion that the business was doing at the time, so going into Australia, across Europe, into The US. Over the last two and a half, three years that I was at GoCardless, I also took on responsibility for running our SME business globally, which was and is still by far the biggest part of the company's revenue. So that was a great journey. I joined GoCardless when the company was about 100 people. I left and it's around 1,000. And so I experienced all of the fun and all of pain that comes with scaling. Earlier this year, I decided to take another step. So joined Airwallex, which I can obviously talk a little bit more about very shortly, both to lead our EMEA business, but also to be a member of our exec team globally as well. So I'm responsible for everything we do here in EMEA commercially, but also all the other fun stuff as well, the people, facts, all that kind of jazz alongside. And as part of the global exec team, I'm also part of the leadership group that drives Zowallax's business and strategy around the world. I have also been, for the past few months, running our marketing team globally as well, which has been an interesting and somewhat unexpected addition to my day to day.
00:02:56 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:02:56] S1: I totally feel your pain around obviously defying parents and whatnot. I was supposed to be a doctor and here I am running a marketing agency. So you can just add another one to the list. I do want to talk about your sort of taking over a bit of the marketing team and how that's worked out for you. You know, to get a lay of the land a little bit, can you just give us an overview of Airwallex and tell us more about the business, who they are, what they do for those that are listening who haven't heard.
00:03:25 · Pranav Sood
[00:03:25] S2: Yeah, absolutely. So Airwallex is basically a fintech platform for modern global businesses. And what we've built is the infrastructure, the APIs, and also the software that enable businesses of all sizes to manage and move their money around the world. And so practically speaking, what does that mean? It means we help our customers get paid by offering an online payments product and also by enabling them to spin up accounts to get paid into in different currencies around the world. It means that we help our businesses and our customers to transfer funds and also to convert them using our FX engine and the proprietary trading that we've built. And it also means that we've built the ability to be able to pay out both to bank accounts around the world, but also using what we call an issuing product to be able to issue cards that you can then spend on. And around that, we've built a set of software, things like expense management, things like billing, things like invoicing, to basically complete the financial operating system that businesses need to operate across borders. So we're relatively new here in EMEA. We've been here about eighteen months, maybe a little bit more. The business came out of Asia, so it's actually founded in Melbourne in Australia. It's quite an interesting founding story. So the co founders, Jack and Max and Xu Jing and Lucy, were actually running a coffee shop. Australia, famous for coffee. Everyone in Melbourne religiously drinks flat whites. They'd all been mates at the University of Melbourne. And for reasons that are still unclear to me, they decided to set up a coffee shop. And in the process of doing that, they basically realized that they had stumbled on a really, really big problem. So they were trying to buy coffee from different parts of the world. They're buying cups. They were paying suppliers, trying to get money from customers. And they just felt like the process of doing that and the pain that they were feeling was clearly not just specific to them. And so they sacked in the coffee business, although the coffee shop still exists, and got into the fintech world instead.
00:05:27 · Shameer Sachdev, Pranav Sood
[00:05:27] S1: Hell of a pivot really, isn't it? [00:05:28] S2: It is, yeah. [00:05:30] S1: I mean, we could probably spend ages just talking about that pivot in itself, but to kind of focus in on the Airwallex piece, I suppose, I mean, are a number of different companies that provide sort of similar sort of infrastructure to Airwallex. My biggest question is what's the key sort of differentiator from Airwallex versus competitors, indirect and direct?
00:05:50 · Pranav Sood
[00:05:50] S2: It's a great question. And we've definitely seen a lot of innovation in the world of cross border money movement over the course of the last few years. I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with some of the more B2C facing companies, so people like Wise and others who've tried to do. I think what differentiates us is a couple of things. The first thing is the scale and the scope of our infrastructure. So we're present across a lot of different countries, so we enable our customers to make payouts in more than 150 different places, 45 different currencies that they can transfer. But also, it's about the way in which we've built the full stack of payments and financial services into our product. And so when you look at many of the other cross border money movement businesses, it's basically an FX piece alongside maybe a little bit of payouts globally. Whereas what you get with Airwallex, of course, you get the FX and the engine that we've built, but you're also getting the money in through acquiring and through the virtual accounts, and you're getting the money out through issuing and through the local settlements. And around all of that, you're getting the software that really completes the financial operating system that the businesses need to operate globally.