The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
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.
00:06:59 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:06:59] S1: One of the bits that I do want to talk about is, I suppose, your move from predominantly from Asia, you've spent the last eighteen months in EMEA, and I know you're looking at expanding a little bit further. I'd just love to find a little bit more about that growth there. First and foremost, how you fostered it, how you've created it, and what do you think the catalyst has been for you in growing the business?
00:07:23 · Pranav Sood
[00:07:23] S2: Yeah, so Airwalex is growing in a way that is really extraordinary. So we are, as of this month, doing around $200,000,000 in ARR. But when you look at the growth year over year in our last quarter, we're still growing at the top line of nearly 180% or maybe just a little bit more than that. And so that's not a level of growth that many businesses in the world ever experience. And that's extraordinary. And it's also huge fun to be a part of because when stuff is growing that fast, things are always breaking, things are always going wrong. And you're constantly it's like playing a game of whack a mole around the world where you're trying to constantly stay on top of all the different things that are happening. From our perspective, when we think about what's driven the growth, I think the key thing is really the quality of the product that we've built and the pain that our customers were feeling before they experienced it. And so when you've got something like cross border payments and cross border money movement, where people have been trying to solve this for generations, mean, you could probably argue that people have been trying to solve it since the ancient times, since the Romans and the Greeks and all the others who started moving money and goods around the world. And when you've got that kind of a depth of pain, someone could come in and say, Look, we're making it really easy. It's also really transparent, and we're going to make it quick and simple for you to get going. That's the kind of thing that resonates pretty deeply and drives the kind of growth, the advocacy that powers your expansion. And as you say, it's quite unusual the way that we've grown because many businesses grow west to east and they start in San Francisco or maybe start in London and try and move across the world. I think there are very few that are going east to west. And it's actually one of the main reasons I joined the business because, for me, it's actually a fascinating set of challenges. Some of them are cultural. How do you work with folks based out in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Australia? Some of them are operational. So from an operating model perspective, it puts a whole bunch of different pressures on you to find ways to work. And then some of them are just more about go to market.
00:09:29 · Pranav Sood, Shameer Sachdev
And your stuff that works in Hong Kong or Singapore or Melbourne may not necessarily work here in EMEA or in The US. And for me, that's part of the challenge. And that's part of the reason I'm excited about being here because when I think about where the world is going, I find it very difficult to believe that Asia and APAC are not going to be a very significant part of the world in the coming years and decades. And so for me, the chance to come in and learn about that was one that I couldn't pass up. [00:09:57] S1: Undoubtedly. I mean, yeah, it does feel like the world is getting smaller. Mean, we're seeing a huge number of FinTechs cropping up. I mean, cropping up is probably the wrong word, but I suppose the growth that we're seeing of FinTechs in The East And Africa is huge in Latin America as well. It's not just London and San Francisco centric. This growth piece leads me nicely into sort of asking about your stint currently as running the marketing activity for Airwallex. I suppose you're not a marketer by trade. You've kind of taken that on and that's landed on your Just tell me about how you're tackling that.