The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
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.
00:10:36 · Pranav Sood
[00:10:36] S2: I had done a fair bit of marketing when at GoCardless because the business I was running, the SME business, was primarily driven by product partnerships and marketing. We actually at GoCardless, one of the, I think, best things we did was actually switch off paid entirely. And so I'd done a relatively small amount of performancepaid marketing beforehand. But we've done quite a bit of organic. We've done a lot of partner marketing. We've done a lot of some of the other channels that you're using around driving advocacy in the dark funnel and so forth. And so that aspect wasn't entirely new to me. But yeah, I think there are lots of elements that I've kind of been exposed to over the last few months that have been quite different. I think the interesting thing for us as Airwalex is that we're still pretty early in our marketing journey. And it's one of the things that attracted me to the business because really what's powered the growth has been the quality of the product versus our ability to go market ourselves super effectively out in the world. When you look at the challenges that we face, some of them had to do with the global nature of our business and the differences in marketing tactics and the channels that you need to use in different places. What works in Australia doesn't necessarily work in Hong Kong or in Singapore. Some of them had to do with the positioning of our product. So a big part of what I've been working on with Jack and with others Jack's the CEO, co founder of Airworks, by the way. But a big part of what I've been working on with him and others has been around how we position ourselves in the market. Ewollux has an extraordinarily broad product. And I think one of the challenges we sometimes have had is articulating not just the features and benefits, but actually the use cases and the problems that we solve in a way that resonates with folks who may not necessarily understand the power of financial infrastructure and licensing. Fintech nerds like me get excited about that, but I recognize that not everyone may do. So a big part has been Zap's piece around positioning. I've actually spent probably more time than I would have anticipated literally in Figma as we've been rewriting our corporate site and thinking about how we position ourselves externally.
00:12:48 · Pranav Sood
And then the other thing is also just about hiring and team building. We operate an extremely distributed business. And so we don't have an HQ per se. There's not a single office where we have a preponderance of our people. And so a big part of what we've been doing has been trying to build some of the rituals and build the team in a way that allows us to operate at scale around the world. That kind of stuff is also relatively new to me because at GoCardless, although we had an international business and have, obviously, they still do. The business was mostly a UK one from a headcount and even revenue and operating cost perspective. And so, we didn't really have the same challenge to solve of how do you keep people in San Francisco, in Melbourne, in Singapore, in London, aligned, working together, and so on. So I think those are probably the three biggest challenges for me. And as someone who's not a marketer, as you said, it's definitely been a learning curve. But it's also definitely been one that I've enjoyed a lot. It's pretty interesting bit of the world to be learning about, as I'm sure you know that.