Building the future of global banking

In 2015, our CEO Jack Zhang and three fellow entrepreneurs launched a coffee shop in Melbourne as a laboratory to test and learn around rising global trends in retail. Our founders encountered inefficiencies and unnecessary costs in foreign exchange and banking systems when sourcing products and materials from overseas. Most businesses would see the inefficiencies in cross border payments as a barrier to growth, but our founders saw them as the building blocks for a better solution. From this, Airwallex was born.

By mid-2018, Airwallex’s transaction volume had already skyrocketed and investors poured in. By the end of the year, Airwallex was handling billions of dollars in transactions and raised a further US $80million to support a valuation of US$450million.

Now the leading cross border payments business, a series E-2 raise in 2022 grew the fintech’s valuation to US $5.6billion, marking a key year for expansion, acquisitions, and obtaining a rare Chinese payments license. Airwallex was only the second foreign company outside China to do so.

By 2024, Airwallex reached significant scale, processing US $100billion in annual transaction volume with over 100,000 customers and nearing US $500million in annual revenue.

Airwallex sees opportunities where others see obstacles. Jack’s unrelenting drive to build something meaningful highlights how passion and hard work can turn even the smallest ideas, like ones born in a coffee shop, into a global multi-billion dollar business.