Airwallex co-founder, president and St Cuth's old girl Lucy Liu.
Payments platform Airwallex has put its first boots on the ground in New Zealand.
The Australian fintech unicorn has hired the Auckland-based Lowry Gladwell as its New Zealand lead and first local staffer.
Formerly head of strategic partnerships at Xero and head of partnerships, Asia Pacific for Lightspeed (the Canadian firm that bought point-of-sale software firm Vend), Gladwell will hire 10 other New Zealand staff before year’s end in business, sales and operations roles.
Airwallex already has a number of local clients following a remote launch in 2022, including band management firm Merlin, which uses it to pay overseas suppliers in US dollars.
Traditional banks required a year-long relationship before offering multi-currency accounts, but Airwallex provided an immediate solution, Merlin founder James Mason said.
“We’re a personal brand agency for chief executives and founders. Roughly 80% of our clients are in the US,” Merlin said.
“Our services are subscription-based, but the monthly fees are much more than most people can put on a company credit card. This meant international bank transfers, which are a pain for finance teams. Airwallex allowed us to have US bank accounts in days so clients could pay in US dollars and without conversion or hassle. Yes, we could have set up foreign currency accounts with our NZ bank, but they were so slow, came with tons of transfer fees and were wrapped in compliance tape. The process felt so outdated.
“The clincher of Airwallex was their foreign currency cards. We subscribe to a number of international software services. The Airwallex cards allow us to avoid international credit card fees.”
Another is Rodd & Gunn. Mitch Halstead, a senior accountant with the retail chain, says it made expense management gains after replacing Amex cards and Expensify with Airwallex virtual and physical business debit cards for multi-currency transactions.
The number of missing receipts fell from 30% to 1%, Halstead says.
Two of New Zealand’s fastest-growing global tech success stories, Tracksuit and Auror, are also customers.
Global customers include the likes of Shein and Qantas (the airline uses Airwallex behind the scenes to power Qantas Business Money – which offers borderless cards, global accounts in up to 11 currencies and low-fee forex and cross-border payments). It also works with Afterpay and Xero.
Airwallex was founded a decade ago in Melbourne. Company lore holds that Jack Zhang and Max Li started a speciality coffee shop but were struggling with high exchange rates when they tried to buy cups from China and beans from Kenya and Brazil via Western Union.
Zhang, a software engineer with ANZ decided to build his own solution.
Three of their friends from Melbourne University – Xijing Dai, Ki-lok Wong and Lucy Liu – came on board to help.
Liu – who spent her high school years at St Cuthbert’s College in Auckland and still has family here – also chipped in the $1 million that became the start-up’s first seed money.
A series of further raises included a breakthrough US$100 million ($172m) raise at a US$1 billion valuation in 2019 – officially anointing Airwallex as a unicorn (a tech firm that reaches a 10-figure valuation before it lists).
By that point, its backers included Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Mastercard, Australian VC Square Peg, and Chinese social media and gaming conglomerate Tencent. Airwallex was being talked about in the same breath as fellow Aussie unicorns Canva and Atlassian.
Like Stripe, which also recently hired its first local lead, Airwallex has been the subject of persistent initial public offer rumours but has never gone public.
Today, its private equity valuation stands at around US$5.6b (with Zhang at number 138 on The Australian’s 2025 rich list with an estimated net worth of A$1.2b) and it has around 100,000 customers and 2000 staff and growing worldwide.
Airwallex competes with the likes of Revolut and Wise, but Liu says more broadly her company is competing with the services offered by traditional banks, which are still many companies’ first port of call.
“If they [businesses] are trying to expand into various countries all at once, they have to open bank accounts one at a time, do compliance, and often visit the country, too. Whereas with Airwallex, it’s the same day and as close to free as possible,” Liu says.
An Airwallex for Start-ups programme offers $50,000 foreign exchange on a capital raise with zero fees and 0% margin, plus 1% cashback on international transactions made using Airwallex cards.
Could cryptocurrencies and the blockchain disrupt Airwallex, just as it disrupted the banks before it?
“The application for payments is still limited – for many reasons, including volatility,” Liu said.
“A lot of people talk about cost-savings and efficiency with crypto – but we can achieve instant payment worldwide in real-time without crypto and are close to free. Why would you use something more risky when you can achieve it with fiat currencies?”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.