Airwallex — What I Think
Airwallex is what happens when engineers who actually had the problem rebuild the cross-border stack from the silicon up instead of reselling someone else’s.
Most “global payments” companies are a UI bolted onto correspondent banking. They dress up SWIFT, take a cut, call it innovation. Airwallex went the other way — own the licences, own the local rails, own the FX engine, and treat the whole thing as infrastructure you expose through an API. Much harder company to build. Much harder one to copy.
The insight: in cross-border, the margin lives in the seams. Every time money hops between correspondent banks, someone clips the FX, someone holds it overnight, someone charges a lifting fee, and the small business eating all of it has no idea it’s happening. Airwallex’s move was to collapse the hops — plug directly into local clearing in each market so money moves domestically on both ends and the “international” part becomes an internal book transfer. Internalise the rails and you stop paying the toll. You become the toll.
And the right altitude is the financial layer underneath other software, not a destination app. The future of business payments isn’t a website you log into, it’s an API embedded inside whatever software the business already runs. Airwallex built for the embedded, programmable, multi-entity reality of how global companies actually operate, where one firm has a Hong Kong entity, a US subsidiary, suppliers in Vietnam, and customers in Europe, all needing to move money like it’s one balance sheet.
The exposure: this is a war of attrition against Wise, Nium, Stripe, and the banks finally waking up. Owning licences globally is a moat and a millstone — defensible, also slow and capital-hungry. And “infrastructure for everyone” invites every adjacent giant to wonder why they shouldn’t just build it themselves. The arc bends toward whoever has the most direct rails in the most corridors, funded the cheapest, executing without a single misstep across a dozen regulators at once. Easy.
Favorite & worst CEO
On leadership: Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO. Origin story checks out — frustration over FX costs at an earlier venture, then the call to solve it at the infrastructure layer instead of the marketing layer. I connect strongly with the build-it-from-the-rails-up instinct, the refusal to be a wrapper, the willingness to eat the brutal licensing grind because that’s where the moat is. The founder risk in someone that aggressive is just the strength inverted: “own everything, everywhere” can outrun focus, and a global rails company lives or dies on whether ambition stays married to operational discipline across every regulator that can ruin your week.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.