Airwallexthe Australian fintech that has spent a decade quietly building the global payments infrastructure is moving into personal payments. The move deepens its competition with Stripe across the payments stack and enables the startup to take direct aim at Square and Adyen in one of the last major battlegrounds in fintech.
Airwallex is launching a point-of-sale product it says does something its competitors’ offerings don’t: It allows businesses to accept in-person payments in multiple countries through a single platform, without integrating local vendors in each market.
“When a business expands into a new market, it typically has to integrate with a new local buyer, navigate fragmented compliance and manage yet another set of supplier relationships,” CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told TechCrunch.
In 2019, Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion, when Airwallex had just $2 million in revenue. But Zhang decided to keep building. “I even said yes to the deal,” he said, recalling months of negotiations. “But what really changed my mind is when I actually came back to Melbourne and got into what made me want to build Airwallex.”
Zhang founded Airwallex in 2015 out of frustration with the friction and cost of transferring money internationally, but it took a different approach than most fintechs: It spent years assembling its own payment rails.
Today, Airwallex is valued at 8 billion dollars from its investors, it claims to generate about $1.3 billion in annual revenue, and that number is growing by about 85% every year. The startup says it now serves more than 46,000 US businesses and processes $100 billion annually.
The startup currently has nearly 90 regulatory licenses in around 50 markets, direct connections to local payment networks in more than 120 countries, and the ability to settle transactions in more than 90 currencies. It’s the infrastructure itself, Zhang says, that Stripe and Square essentially lack – particularly the local banking licenses that allow capital to be held, converted and deployed in a given market rather than immediately repatriated.
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“Stripe and Square can process payments in Japan,” he said, “but when you actually process the payment, you have to pay immediately into the merchant’s bank account. You can’t keep the money.”
Airwallex’s license in Japan — which took seven years to acquire — allows it to do just that.
The company’s new POS product extends this infrastructure to the physical counter. Its platform now connects in-store and online payments and offers unified reporting and direct integrations into back-office systems. For businesses operating cross-border, stores in different countries can operate with the same payment systems and settle in the same space, without the usual tangle of relationships with local suppliers.
Adyen, the listed Dutch payments company, makes a similar global infrastructure argument and is perhaps Airwallex’s most direct competitor in this area. At the legacy end of the market, Fiserv, as well as the recently combined Global Payments and Worldpay, hold huge market share among traditional retailers, although their architectures are considerably older.
Whether businesses with established Stripe or Square relationships will find the global infrastructure argument compelling enough to switch is an open question. Airwallex is betting that multinationals tired of managing different payment vendors in each country will favor its product.
“There just hasn’t been any real competition for Stripe in the last 15 years, which is surprising considering how big the market is,” Zhang said.
