The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
00:27:32 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:27:32] S1: Yeah, I imagine this problem is faced by the organizations such as yourself that are operating multiple territories that are global by nature. And just by the way of your product, kind of have to be. I want to take a little bit of a side step and kind of lean in and talk a little bit more about, I suppose, airworks effectively going global. We work with a number of brands and help them grow into new territories. We kind of get bought in at the point where the organization has decided what territory that they wanna go live or they wanna grow in. What was the process for AirWallax in kind of like deciding what territories to launch in, what countries to venture into? Love to learn more about that process. Was it structured market research? Or how was that decision made?
00:28:22 · Pranav Sood
[00:28:22] S2: Yeah, I think it's important to separate it into two components. One component is about our infrastructure and the work that we've done to build the infrastructure layer that we now built our product on. The other is the go to market side, which is where do you try and commercialize and where do you try and actually grow usage of your product. On the infrastructure side, I actually think it's a little bit counterintuitive, but you need to have a blueprint and a vision which is above and beyond the immediate demand that you can see. And so if you think about Airwallex's infrastructure, we've got, I don't know, maybe 60 odd licenses around the world, and we cover all those different operations, so issuing, acquiring, creating different wallets, local rails, in and out, etcetera, etcetera. And so we've actually built something to a blueprint which was beyond the immediate commercial demand that we saw and we're able to see in the near term. And that's actually really important because when you talk to the global customers that we're working with, what they care about is that they can work with providers and suppliers who can serve them in all the places that they need to be served. And that includes the long tail of places that maybe it doesn't necessarily make short term economic sense to be able to operate in. And so I think AirWallet is actually really lucky in the sense that we were born in a period where capital was pretty cheap and where investors were very patient. And as a consequence of that, the infrastructure side and also, obviously, should say we had in Jack and in our co founders a bunch of leaders who had a very long term vision that they were building towards. And so, a consequence of all of those three things, we have had the ability to build to a blueprint on the infrastructure side that is much beyond what you would have done if you were being purely economically rational. If you're being purely economic rational, you'd have said, okay, well, let's just build Australia and then we'll do a little bit in Australia. And once you've done that, we'll do New Zealand and then we'll do da da da da da. So, on infra piece, I think it's a little bit different to what you mentioned, which is you've got to think big and you've got to think in terms of blueprints and in terms of five, ten year visions.
00:30:36 · Pranav Sood
On the commercialization side, which maybe was more the initial angle of your question, I think there it's a combination of things which are strategically critical for you and also responding to the demand that you see or could see in the markets that you find interesting. And so when you think about someone like us, our ambition is to be a global winner. Our ambition is to be a global leader. And as a consequence of that, we need to have a significant business outside of markets where we were born. So you can't be a global winner if you're an Australia only business or you're an Australia business with a bit of Hong Kong. You need to be in EMEA. You need to have a presence in The US. You need to be able to knit all of that together into a coherent whole. And so some of the international expansion that you do is driven by that strategic imperative, which is the need to be global. Obviously, then there's a double click, which says, Okay, well, yeah, sure, I need to be in EMEA, but which markets in that region do you think we should be in? Because it's not guess what? EMEA is not a single market. It's a patchwork of countries, all of which have different needs and different products and all the rest of it that you need to bring to bear. And so that's when I think you do more of the kinds of analyses that maybe you're alluding to in the question, which is to say, well, number one, what's the demographic perspective on the country, businesses in your TAM, etcetera, etcetera? Number two, what's the lift from a product perspective? Number three, what's the minimum viable entity from a resourcing point of view? And with all of that stuff together, you can form a view that says, Okay, we should prioritize this. I think maybe the other thing that I haven't mentioned, but which is critical, is responding to demand. So if you're lucky enough to have customers ready in a market who are asking you to come there, that is just about the strongest signal that you can Yeah,
00:32:30 · Shameer Sachdev, Pranav Sood
[00:32:30] S1: absolutely, yeah. [00:32:31] S2: Respond to. So all of those things are things we take into consideration. And if I make it really real for me here in London, we're already across EMEA in terms of our customer base. So we have customers across Mainland Europe, in The Middle East as well. As I look into 2023 and beyond, I think we're very excited about Israel as a market. We think there's a lot of potential there. The kinds of businesses that get born in Israel tend to be the kinds of businesses that will be great customers for Airwallex. We're very excited about some of the countries around the Benelux region, so particularly Netherlands, where we've got an office already and a bunch of people, but also we see a lot of cross border business and e commerce. And then we're looking at some of the larger European markets as well, where we can see the potential for our products, but where I think some of the questions around the deliverability become quite interesting. I've yet to see an analysis of which market you should enter in Europe for any product that doesn't immediately conclude that Germany is the biggest and most attractive place to be. It's also, as I've experienced at GoCardless, it's one of the more difficult markets to enter from a go to market perspective.
00:33:42 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:33:42] S1: It's just funny you say that, yeah, it tends to always be the dark markets and then the Nordics and then, yeah, it's always seems to be the go to areas to go to on paper, but then it's like cultural nuances kind of get bought into that and other issues. I think we've covered a kind of a huge amount in the time that we're speaking. I think it's sort of one question really kind of left to ask, which is, what's the outlook for yourself and what's the outlook for
00:34:15 · Pranav Sood
[00:34:15] S2: AirWallax? I mean, look, I think the future is very bright for AirWallax. We have been very fortunate to be backed by some fantastic investors. Despite the market downturn and some of the challenges that tech businesses have faced, we have been able to maintain our valuation, you know, raise money from new investors on the same terms actually, which is doubly good. And so, I think we're in a really strong position to be able to capitalize on the growth that we've seen already and on the opportunities that we continue to see to invest in growing the business. For myself, I don't I never know how to answer that question. I'm super excited about the challenge of building Airwallex's business across EMEA. I think we have I'm really fortunate to have a really stellar team of folks who've been there and seen it in other amazing businesses, the Stripes, the Revolutes, the, you know, deliveries, the booking.coms of the world. And so what energizes me is partly the nature of the challenge and the problem that we're trying to solve intellectually. As I mentioned before, I'm a historian by training and so there's a sort of intrigue that comes with trying to solve a problem that the Medicis and all the others have tried to solve at one point or the other and never quite managed it, find quite attractive. The other thing that energizes me is having the chance to work with the people that I mentioned, the kind of stellar talents who do a bunch of stuff that I don't know how to do much better than I could ever dream of doing it. And so hopefully the combination of those two things will make us successful into the next years. But certainly from my point of view, it's the challenge and it's the opportunity that continues to excite me.