Hi Fintech Architects,
In this episode, Lex speaks with Ravi Adusumilli - President and GM of the Americas at Airwallex. Ravi and Lex discuss how Airwallex has evolved into a global financial platform by offering businesses an integrated suite of cross-border payments, treasury, and banking services. Founded in 2015, Airwallex now supports 150,000 customers, processes $130 billion in annualized volume (up 73% YoY), and projects a $1 billion revenue run rate by year-end.
The company’s success stems from its end-to-end infrastructure, homegrown payment rails, and multi-product strategy, with 80% of revenue now coming from customers using more than one product. Airwallex differentiates itself by focusing on global-first B2B use cases and building regional autonomy alongside centralized infrastructure. While not prioritizing stablecoins today, the company is exploring AI-driven financial operations and aims to reach $1 trillion in transaction volume by 2030.
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Key discussion points:
Airwallex’s Infrastructure: Proprietary Global Payment Network
Airwallex operates a proprietary global payment infrastructure that processes 95% of its $130 billion in annualized transaction volume. The company has developed its own technology and regulatory framework in partnership with over 60 banks worldwide. This approach reduces dependence on legacy systems such as SWIFT and supports greater control over transaction speed, cost, and compliance.Expansion Through Multi-Product Offering
Airwallex has expanded its services beyond cross-border payments to include card issuance, spend management, treasury functions, and merchant acquiring. According to company data, 80% of revenue is generated from customers using multiple products. Payments now account for 70% of net revenue and are growing at three times the rate year over year.Decentralized Go-To-Market Structure
Airwallex employs a regional management model, with General Managers responsible for performance and operations in specific geographies. This structure is supported by centralized functions such as product development, compliance, and engineering. With 1,700 employees in 26 offices, the company uses this hybrid model to manage growth and adapt to local regulatory environments across multiple regions, including Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Background
Before joining Airwallex, Ravi held senior roles at some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent technology companies. At Pinterest, he led global partnerships and business development, including a notable integration with Shopify that connected Pinterest’s 500 million users to over a million merchants. Prior to that, he was at Facebook, where he worked on strategic alliances with enterprise players like Salesforce and Adobe to drive business adoption of Facebook’s advertising solutions. Ravi also spent time at Netflix, where he developed and expanded the company’s partner ecosystem to deliver streaming content through connected devices worldwide.
His early career included a product management role at Hewlett-Packard, where a cross-company collaboration project involving Disney, DreamWorks, and Google sparked his passion for building partnership-led businesses—a theme that has defined his professional journey.
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Topics:
Airwallex, Stripe, Brex, Rippling, Shopify, Pinterest, Visa, fintech, global payments, e-commerce, cross-border transactions, paytech, embedded payments, CFO stack, stablecoins, AI
Timestamps
1’02: Building Through Partnerships: The Platform Strategy Behind a $130B Fintech
7’24: Why It’s Working: Scaling B2B Payments in a Crowded Fintech Market
12’21: From Coffee Beans to Global Rails: How Cross-Border Payments Became the Wedge for Platform Expansion
19’02: Sticky by Design: How Regional Autonomy and Multi-Product Depth Drove Global Expansion
25’31: From Credibility to Scale: When Partnerships Start Driving Growth
29’33: Beyond Point Solutions: Why Global Platforms Are Replacing Fragmented Payment Stacks
34’47: Solving the CFO Stack: A Unified Approach to Global Money Movement
38’14: Resilient by Design: How Airwallex Manages Multi-Bank, Multi-Market Complexity
42’51: The Hidden Cost of Scale: Inside the Engineering Behind a $130B Network
46’15: The Next Phase: Airwallex’s Vision for a Global Financial OS
49’54: The channels used to connect with Ravi & learn more about Airwallex
Illustrated Transcript
Lex Sokolin:
Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's conversation. I'm really excited today to talk about our wallets. And we have with us Ravi Adusumilli, who is the president and General manager of the Americas for Airwallex. And he's also had an amazing career in various business development roles across the technology space. And so, with that, I'm really excited to learn from him. Ravi, welcome to the conversation.
Ravi Adusumilli:
Thank you for having me. Excited to have this conversation with you.
Lex Sokolin:
Let's start with sort of the broad strokes of your career. You've been in Silicon Valley and some of the most iconic companies, from Pinterest to Facebook to Netflix. What role do you like taking in those companies? Like what did you gravitate to and what do you think is the unifying thread?
Ravi Adusumilli:
I've been excited about building businesses through partnerships for a long time. It was, you know, a by chance product that I was working on way back in my career at Hewlett-Packard, actually, that led me on a path. I was a product manager. Then I had to build a product that required partnerships from companies like Google, Disney, Dreamworks, and so on. And this is now more than a decade ago where two different companies coming together to deliver something amazing to the customers that either company could not necessarily do it by themselves. Lex so I kind of jumped on that opportunity, and since then, until I joined Airwallex, that has been my area of passion. Whether it was at Netflix, building a partner ecosystem where you can deliver this amazing streaming content of Netflix to millions of customers all over the world through devices or at Facebook, where you are helping the ultimate businesses to be able to reach out to their customers, get to their goals by bringing companies like Salesforce and Adobe together with Facebook to provide solutions to businesses, or at Pinterest, most recently in a similar role.
I think what drove me in all of those companies was this common thread of company A has a set of tools and features and specialties, and company B has their own set of tools and specialties. How can you bring the magic of those two companies so you can serve and customers much better than you could by yourself? The most recent example that might give some context on how this all works is before I came here, I was at Pinterest leading global partnerships and business development. We had at that point about half a billion users. And we've struck this partnership with Shopify, which now has more than 2 million merchants. But back then, maybe a million merchants. So how do you bring this, this amazing systems of merchants and users together so that you can display all these products to users and like, get all the intent the users have on whether they're building the crypt or building their next backyard or whatever. Right? So again, neither company couldn't do it by themselves. But how do we do it together? Is it common thread that has, you know, that have been spending in the last decade? And that was actually my original journey coming into your wallets as well.
How can we work with the banking ecosystem globally? How can we work with partners like Shopify, Walmart, Amazon and so on so we can build a partnership-based business? So that's been the threat.
Lex Sokolin:
Can you give us high level on Airwallex in terms of its core value proposition, and then the scale that it has achieved to date? I mean, I think the company recently closed $300 million round at a $6.2 billion valuation. So clearly something is going right. So, what is the thing that is going right and what's the core economic value add.
Ravi Adusumilli:
Yeah grateful for so many things going great. We've been in the business about a decade now. The Airwallex company was originally founded in Australia in 2015. So, what it is at a core of what we do at Airwallex is a global payments and financial platform for modern businesses. You will continually continue to hear me double clicking on global and modern businesses as we talk through the rest of this conversation, we manage the full lifecycle of our customers banking and payment needs across borders.
If you were to think of Airwallex as you know in a nutshell, it is more of a what we have is capabilities of a global bank, but we bring it in a much more modern digital package. In terms of scale, we have about 1700 employees now across 26 offices. We're now serving over 150,000 customers worldwide. These are customers that are small businesses like yourself, potentially to very large multinational corporations. And we're fortunate to see business growing at 50% year over year in terms of customer growth and what we've all seen in this round funding round that you mentioned. We also announced that we are expecting to get to $1 billion of annual run rate by the end of this year, and we're also seeing significant growth in our overall transaction volume as well. We mentioned we are doing about $130 billion in annualized volume globally. That represents about 73% year on year growth. And while we're expecting to hit that billion by end of this year, as of Q1, we saw $720 million in annualized revenue. And that is about 90% growth year over year.
So yeah, very fortunate and excited to be at this point where our business is growing and we're getting to ten years into this business. And it's great to see these numbers coming together.
Lex Sokolin:
That's pretty amazing scale. So, I'll follow it up with a basic question, which is just why is this working? Because the payment space or the banking space is full of excellent operators, lots of good players. And you've got, you know, whether it's TransferWise, you've got Stripe and you've got Block, and then you have the different approaches to the space, whether it's the swift approach between different banks or whether it is trying to figure out embedded finance and open up banking accounts with API access, or it's the European open banking push. Like, there's so much stuff, right? So why is it that Airwallex could get to I guess based on the numbers you're saying, it's like 10% of Stripe’s volume already and growing faster in a market that, you know, does have lots of players in it. What is it that you've been able to do to outmanoeuvre everybody?
Ravi Adusumilli:
Several things. First of all, this is a very, very large market, right? Like if you look at all the different players in this space and the banks that have existed globally, it's like we're talking about multiple trillions of dollars of opportunities. So, this is definitely not a market where 1 or 2 players will take it all. And to what I mentioned in the intro, where all the global and modern are the two key points for us, like ever since the company was founded, we have always had this vision that we want to be able to bring modern businesses. We want to bring that global connectivity to them from day one, not after they've grown like, you know, into 5 or 6 years of their journey. So that's something like how we've been constantly building the business. And also, the current banking system, for the most part, is not necessarily modern or tech savvy. Right. Swift, you mentioned, was established in 1973. So, it's over 50 years old. You have no idea.
Like, you know how this correspondent, banking correspondent, banks work. You know, where if a transaction is stuck somewhere, who's got it? Like how do you unwind it? Right. So, it's still pretty antiquated system. So, we built our own network that is supported by over 60 banks globally. In terms of what we see as the main reason on the way for this growth is I mean, there's several trends we've seen over these years, right? Covid e-commerce boom thanks to Covid because of that. And then, you know, now people are working all over the world. So there's payroll use cases have shifted. Customers are buying products from merchants that are not necessarily in this country. So, there's like cross-border commerce that is happening at a much higher pace than we've ever seen. E-commerce itself has taken on quite a bit. Payroll has gone global. And even a decade ago when the company was started, the vision of having to the vision of like bringing businesses together and giving the entire world as its playground for those businesses has been in the mission from day one.
So of course we had to build step-by-step, right? Initially, we were only doing cross-border stuff, right. How do you move money from currency A to currency B? That was the main DNA of the company. We've come far beyond that to some of the examples of given like TransferWise or Stripe or what not. Right? I also believe we're quite unique in the way we operate, because one, we only focus on B2B use cases or B2B2C. So, our business is completely focused on businesses. And then two. Even though we started in cross-border, we were much more than that today. Just to emphasize on the numbers. Today our net revenue is about 70% coming from payments, which is merchant, acquisition, merchant acquiring and spend management. And that payments business is growing 3X year-over-year, which is like we haven't even started with payments for a good part of the decade. And we're seeing massive growth because this is a very, very large market. And then also as we expand from initially doing just cross-border to now payments to spend management, card issuing, we're also starting to launch interest bearing accounts to customers all over the world.
You know. Multi entity management and so on. The number of customers who use our products is also increasing. So that means you have more revenue coming from them less churn. I think most recently we saw 80% of our revenue comes from customers who use more than one product, which is amazing right there because they're seeing value in Airwallex, not just for whatever reason they came in. If you're a merchant, let's say you wanted to come into Airwallex because you want to take payments through Airwallex. Then you see, oh, I have value here in terms of opening these multi-currency accounts all over the world. Now I can issue cards to my employees. Now I can like, you know, do spend management for my company. Right. So, so that's so the reasons we're growing is because one it's a large market. Two, it is a multiple products and value we provide to our customers. And three, we're constantly growing our footprint, as you may have seen in the news now, we're investing in LATAM as well right. So, this is a I like to think about Airwallex is a living breathing thing that only gets better as we scale.
Lex Sokolin:
In the early days. You talked about kind of the initial wedge into the market being cross border. Can you talk about the persona of the businesses involved at that time, geographically or from a size perspective, and what kinds of products did they resonate with in the beginning? And then once we understand kind of that early value prop, then I think it'll make sense. The vectors of growth you described.
Ravi Adusumilli:
Maybe I'll also tell you how the company came together. So that gives you even more context on what type of businesses we started the company for. Initially, the founders were excited about bringing like this is back in the day now more than a decade ago. As you may know, Melbourne, Australia is a haven for coffee lovers. People love the coffee and so on. So initially the founders were starting to create a premium coffee chain, and in their own experience as a small business, they noticed that it was quite expensive when they were trying to buy machinery from different places, like beans from Indonesia or Jamaica or whatnot.
So, they saw firsthand cost of operating a business in this world, when not everything you are buying or selling to is in the city or the country you are from. And it just so happened that Jack was and as an engineer at one of the Australian banks, and he knew exactly how exchange rates work, and he was like, oh, instead of trying to create this coffee business, let me bring what I know in this space into a company. Right. So initially the business was focused on probably a less small businesses there definitely under 100 employees. They operate in countries like Australia or several parts of Europe or Hong Kong or Singapore or whatnot. And they're either in the business of e-commerce, where they have products to sell, they have services to sell, but their customers are not in the same country. Right? They're either shipping products to their buyers cross-border, or they have their own suppliers. They may be buying stuff from suppliers from other countries. And every time you're moving money, there's one, two, 3% effects, right? So, this all adds up very quickly.
Not just only you have to pay whatever, two and a half, 3% that companies like Stripe or others charge, but also more importantly, like now you're a small business. If you were to think about the coffee shop example, right? Like 3% you're paying on effects on buying your beans quickly adds up to cogs of your business, right? So initially it was small businesses that were less than 100 employees. Primarily cross-border operations. In both ways, not just money coming in, money going out. In a lot of cases where what happened is you're a business, you accept payment from your customer in a non-local currency. Let's say you're in Australia; somebody pays you in USD. Now you also have a supplier. Now in UK. Typically, the flow at that point was you would take that USD convert into AUD, you've paid one that significantly higher markup, and then you take a part of those Australian dollars you've received from your customers. Now you have a bill that is due to your supplier in GBP or another currency.
Now you're having to pay that currency change again and you're paying that bill, right. So, it is like double conversion. So, it is cost prohibitive to run a business like this. So initially it was a lot of those customers that are primarily cross-border. Then customers are asking us, hey, you're already helping me move this money from country to country. Be in a lot of cases. I don't want to move the money. I want to keep it in a bank in that current in that country. Let's say the same example. I want to keep my US dollars that I'm getting from my US customers in US, because I might need that money for paying suppliers later. Right. I'm sitting here in Melbourne. Can you give me like half a dozen different bank accounts in the local currencies? Okay, sure. Then we started building a treasury solution so our customers can have access to all these bank accounts globally. And then the natural path was, can you also help me take these payments in multiple currencies like help me pay my help my customers pay me in local currencies, so they don't have to pay these exorbitant fees.
Then we added payments right then. Oh, I was a 10% company when I joined Airwallex. The business has grown now. I have 100 people. I want to be able to issue cards to my employees, so they travel, or they have their own expenses. Can you help me with card issuing product? Okay. We built a card issuing product. Now we're at a stage where these hundred people companies are like in 200, 300. They're like, hey, can you actually provide interest rate interest for my accounts? I'm holding money that I'm holding with you, or can you help me provide software so I can do spend management? Right. So that has been the company evolution since we started in the types of businesses that we've seen. One other thing we've seen is to my point earlier that Swift has been so antiquated in how long it has been there. With all this infrastructure that we offer to our customers, our products are built on is something that is homegrown, built at Airwallex.
This 130 payment, billion payment volume I mentioned is on top of Airwallex’s own network that we pay, right? And 95% of this volume moves through our own payment rails. Then we also realized, oh, we built this for our customers. Maybe there is a way we can also white label and embed any and all part of this infrastructure we built so we can power businesses like a Shein or Brex or Rippling so that they can build also embedded fintech services without having to reinvent the wheel of what we've already done. So that's been the evolution.
Lex Sokolin:
What I'm trying to wrap around is at every stage here, the client is saying, I would rather build on top of the relationship I have with Airwallex because they already have my accounts and so on, and my workflows, rather than let me get wrapper deal from my spend management and let me get rippling for my employee payroll and so on, you know what I mean? Like because there are chunky players in the categories that you describe, but it sounds like maybe a combination of yes, maybe in the US, but not geographically where our wallets started.
And so, it was kind of a blue ocean opportunity. And then even though once you get big and global, you do have very direct, high-quality competitors. These are platforms that are really sticky. So, the multi products all work together. Is that how I should interpret the story or is there more nuance there.
Ravi Adusumilli:
Yeah, I think there is. That is exactly right in the countries in the regions where we're operating. We were one of the few players who were seeing this value of providing multi products and naturally expanding. You're right, there are players in the US like Rippling, Brex and others who may have started with a certain product, and then they are expanding other products to other products. In some cases, like replying we don't do payroll today, we've been able to find a partnership where we were ultimately, we're a money movement engine, right? Like, we move money all over the world. What we've been able to do is help Rippling pay their employees in multiple parts of the world. So even in areas where we don't have a product for, say, like payroll, for example, or taxes, we've been able to offer our infrastructure and find multiple uses for our infrastructure.
So yes, you're right, we naturally grew in markets that we didn't have a lot of competition. And even when there is competition in the US where there are much more established players, we've been able to find areas where we can work together. To my partnership that I mentioned before on okay, like how can we work together so we can still help them and still get business? While we may be competing in similar areas outside of the US, if that makes sense.
Lex Sokolin:
Tell me about the scaling of the company, because you said there's 1700 employees, and I'm sure a lot of that has been kind of in recent years as a company went more global. I'm really interested in, especially given your role, the go to market structure. What does that look like in Airwallex? Is it by geography? Is it product led? How did the go to market motion get built and what is its shape today?
Ravi Adusumilli:
Yeah, it is in some ways crazy like that. You know, again, from the examples we discussed, I have been in US led companies that are much, much bigger in size and revenue, but it's also scale.
It's also crazy that Airwallex with 1700 employees at a billion, almost a billion-run rate, has 26 offices globally. Right. It's quite unusual for a company that is so distributed all over the world. But it also speaks volumes about our founder's mission on how we are now going global, not just helping customers go global, but their role is being global has been in our DNA from the beginning in terms of their scaling the go to market. Motion has been now almost like 8 or 10 years into our journey, ten years into our journey. We’re investing more and more into product led growth. Initially, it was primarily sales and channel partnerships. So another good, effective way of go to market for us as being how do we centralize global functions while retain regional autonomy or regional focus, which I believe is something that Airwallex early on has been able to figure out and do much better than I would say most of my experience in the past where, you know, typically headquarters trying to do a certain thing or forcing a certain thing.
I myself have been guilty in the past of, you know, trying to launch a product, sitting here in Silicon Valley and making assumptions for like, my partner for my counterparts in Asia, Europe or whatever. Right. I think pretty early on. Our father, Jack, our CEO founder, has supported this GM model where I have, I report to Jack, and I have counterparts in Europe and Australia and so on where we have regional responsibility. Ultimately, the PNL sits with me here in Americas. I am directly responsible for the go to market plan, whether it's by sales, by partnerships or whatnot. But then I also have central functions account on product engineering, compliance and so on. And we've been able to replicate this model in all the in almost all the parts that are parts of the world that we operate, which has been uniquely helpful for us, where we have a central marketing function. And we've also had marketing led growth for a long time. We're investing in branding through our McLaren partnership, where we've been spending a lot of money on growth, performance and Marketing.
Now, we've been at the scale that we have and the products that I mentioned where we're seeing increasingly attached rate of our products growing. We've also investing in a product growth function. So, it's natural evolution from what I've seen also in my past is after like you see your sales teams and partnerships teams grow in the business. Then you try to get even more efficient in product, trying to sell itself in some way. So that's what's happening in my purview. What I've seen is when I joined Airwallex, we were 20 people. We were barely getting some money transfer licenses. We had almost no revenue. And thanks to this model that we have in place of the central plus regional investment, we are we now have almost 200 people in the region. We're approaching like, you know, a 30 million run rate on us alone. And we haven't even started monetizing in Brazil and other parts of LATAM, right? So, this model has been working really well for us, and we continue we will continue to invest in this model in other regions as well.
Lex Sokolin:
When you join the company and more broadly, when you joined the other high-tech companies that you were involved in for you to move the needle, what are the prerequisites? Like, you know, for like a partnerships function, to add value to a company, you usually need to have a certain level of scale, right? Because you mentioned you've walked through the sort of like, okay, in the very beginning, it's marketing founder led sales, and then you add kind of human sales and business development reps and qualifying and closing deals and so on. And then you get to a level of sort of complexity that you might have revenue operations and all of these additional kinds of functions. When does a company need a partnership function and how is that different from other go to market functions that might be much more focused on leads, closings, revenue, that kind of thing.
Ravi Adusumilli:
Yeah, we're certainly focused on leads and the funnel and optimizing this funnel across the leads. And what leads make sense in not like we're definitely investing in it I would say from in the last couple of years, three years or so.
Jack and I are still involved in several of our deals because we really care about our customers and we will never be far from the customer. So, I don't think we'll be walking away from founder lead or meet me not being involved in deals in terms of when partnerships and like how do you work together? What time frame? I say you have to have a good enough product market fit. What is the value proposition you're bringing? Why does Airwallex exist in the sea of other providers? You know? How do you stand out? I think you need to have a pretty good clarity about that and then be able to, like, explain to partners, to customers, like where we can add that value and there needs to be examples, or there needs to be some scale and validation of that value proposition. Right. So initially it was definitely hard work to try and convince customers or partners here in the US. But our angle was, look, we bring a unique perspective to your businesses because we bring our global first mentality that most US companies may not have an experience in.
And we while we may may be a new player in the US, we're already operating billions of volumes outside of the US. More importantly, the regulatory framework outside of the US is very different and very complex, which we've already invested and we're already operating on. Why do you want to reinvent the wheel? So that's been the angle. Like even though we didn't have a lot of those validation points in the US, it was winning one customer at a time, two customers at a time, and having those customers be your champions like we had early days. Like we were very fortunate to be able to work with some very awesome brands in the US, like Brex, for example, or Navan, which was trip actions at that point. And these customers were looking for very specific gaps that their current providers may not have offered them. And we were able to fill that gap. We were able to help them scale, and then they found more value in other products, and then they become your references. Right now, they're referring to other customers.
We've also been fortunate, for example, to work with a startup in procurement space like Zip, which has been scaling a lot. You know, we've been involved with them from very early days, and they're growing significantly, and we're fortunate to grow along with them. Right. So those have been the go-to market wins for us, where those early customers are specific problems, specific opportunities give you a chance because of your credibility elsewhere in the markets that need to go to. Then one leads to another and so on. And now we're talking about how can we become like a white label wallet solution for some of these marketplaces? How can we become the payout choice for some of these marketplaces? Right. So, in three years we've been fortunate from going from, hey, trust us on our global capabilities to now can always be your one stop shop for all of your financial needs you have as a business.
Lex Sokolin:
Maybe we can do the same exercise as before about the persona of the business, because the names you mentioned here in the US are very different and much bigger. You know, and immediately my mind goes to like there's lots of pay out and checkout options, like again, like why, how and why, right. That these companies need a global first approach. And that's the main thing. Like they don't want to manage multiple vendors for different geographies. Like or is it something else. Right. Because again, like the payout function is very competitive. And then you're starting to be adjacent to PayPal and visa and Mastercard and Shopify. What's the persona of the initial customers in the Americas, and what is it that you're offering them as a wedge that they couldn't get somewhere else?
Ravi Adusumilli:
Yeah, I think you mentioned that, right. It is because they may have invested in one of the solutions. That is a point solution, right? So, if you look at each one of these spaces alone, they're very competitive. There are some amazing players. If you look at each vertical right, there's like lots of players in payout alone. There's a lot of players in payments alone.
There are some players in wallets alone. There are some players like you know, who do spend management and so on. Right. So, what has been happening is you also mentioned PayPal. What has been happening is some of these marketplaces, some of these e-commerce companies who in the past have had the luxury to have multiple vendors, multiple solutions, multiple tech products to build and maintain. It does not make sense as much now because it is hard to maintain this like 5 or 10 different integrations, and each of them may not necessarily be offering them what the business needs, then they're not necessarily keeping up with the business's growth. For example, we offer like over 100 plus like local payment methods, right? While certain local payment method may not be important to you if you're looking if you're sitting in the US and you're thinking about the world, but then it is very important to that customer in that market, to the point where it influences their buying. Right. If you do not offer that LPM in that market, the customer will not have intention to buy the product from you.
Right. And these pay out providers don't necessarily have all this optionality that the end customers need. It is really, you know, going from multiple vendors in some cases, some of these vendors are not necessarily growing or giving them the right optionality where everyone is coming because everything, we do is cross-border. Everything we do is built on top of a multi-currency wallet. Whether its money coming in, money sitting in that account, earning interest over time, or you have to pay your you have to do payouts from that multi-currency wallet to anywhere in the world, or you want to be able to issue cards against that wallet. You can do all of that through a single wallet’s integration. And we're totally good with customers having choice. We don't necessarily force our customers to use all of their wallet’s capabilities, where we basically go and say, whatever is the biggest pain point today, we're happy to help solve that pain point and let us earn your business over time, and that's what we've seen. Brex came to us originally to just do collections of credit card bills globally on local payment rails.
Right? Then they wanted us to help them with issuing. Then they wanted to help them with effects. Right. So this is how we see being able to operate, even though this is a crowded space because no one else. If you look at by sector, as I mentioned by vertical, yes, we have tons and tons of amazing competition, but then there isn't as much competition when you put it all together in a single platform that is regulated globally, that that has licences all over the world that operates at volume and has multiple products, there's not much or any competition that can offer the same capability. So that's really been our, if you might say resource or value proposition. That's been worked.
Lex Sokolin:
Interesting. So, I'm hearing a bit of like Visa's network of networks positioning and then of course, you mentioned the dynamic between you've got point solutions and applications, and then you've got platforms. And so, there's always this natural pendulum where you'll have a platform that has all the stuff. Let's call that platform for the US, like Bank of America or Citigroup.
And then fintechs come and take it apart and rebuild parts much better and then are able to win business against the platform. And then eventually people get frustrated with managing all the point solutions. And the most successful of the point solutions end up trying to go broader and integrating everything, and then you end up with the next generation platform and sort of the cycle repeats itself. And unlike the visa network of networks, which you know, is a $500 billion company, is valuable enough and gives you a big target to follow. It sounds like you're looking not specifically at the longest tail payment network, but rather the entire money movement movements, payments, small business, treasury stack. Right. So kind of everything for the financial accounts and then money movement around it and the financial workflows related to it. So, it kind of goes from payments into banking capability, spending capability. And so, it's a little bit closer to the business problem. So, it's an aggregation of various business problems related to payments, money movement and banking in a sort of platform aggregator approach. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Ravi Adusumilli:
I'm sure I might use that statement, you said, because I don't think I could have said it better. Exactly that.
Lex Sokolin:
It's okay. I'll take some adviser equity. It's fine.
Ravi Adusumilli:
And yeah, you're exactly right. If you were to think about if you were a CFO at our target size company somewhere in the 10 to 100 range of employees, right. Operating globally, Lovely. How do we continue to add value to you? To you. So, we're bringing you, for lack of a better term, like, you know, bringing everything together in a single financial operating system to the CFO. So, you can manage your business, everything from money in all directions, coming in, coming out, like staying, getting an interest, whatever. Right. And of course, like, we don't do everything today that a CFO might need, like payroll. Right. We will. We'll partner. We don't necessarily do travel.
We'll find opportunities to travel. But in all other aspects, like how can we take that aggregated approach, both in serving customers as Airwallex and we own their customer relationship. And also in some cases, how can we serve customers that we don't necessarily own the customer relationship, like in this example of Brex? Right. But how can we find enough value so we can white label and license our infrastructure in countries in markets it makes sense. So collectively, we're bringing that platform to our customers and increasingly become this financial operating system. The CFO is what we're building.
Lex Sokolin:
Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Now that we're in this world where we're a global platform that's multi-jurisdictional with regulatory hooks and a whole bunch of places and, you know, integrated to probably hundreds of different financial services. The natural question that comes up is, you know, how does this thing stick together? Because if we look at embedded finance and in particular, let's say the synapse evolve situation.
Synapse had a pretty straightforward integration into what was, I think, two core banking systems, one of which was the one they used consistently. And I believe that was Jack Henry. And then they had, through Jack Henry one into integration, into the evolve Bank. And maybe like two other banks and primarily they were going through Jack Henry into a valve, and that was the data stream. And then they've repackaged that out to maybe 20 to 50 B2C customers, and they were at the B2B intermediation layer. And in doing that, they ended up losing somewhere between 50 to $100 million, blowing up synapse, blowing up a valve. And it wasn't synapses faults. But the reconciliation between these systems was so profoundly horrible. Based on the data architecture in old core banking, based on the data practices of a small to mid-sized bank like evolve, and based on a startup that was moving very quickly, like synapse, like that was just a powder keg of missing payments, unable to reconcile systems and so on. What you've described is like a hundred times more complicated because you're using many banks in different geographies.
You're eating the effects complexity. You're working through many more workflows than just like sitting on top and reconciling payments. How do you solve this and why does it work?
Ravi Adusumilli:
Yeah. Great question. I think because we've started outside of the US, and there's also this concept of a sponsor bank where you can easily become a fintech overnight does not exist outside of the US in most parts of the world, at least that I'm aware of. Right. So, we always see regulation. We see compliance as key parts of our how we've grown the company and key moat for a company. Right. So even before we launched in the US, which was like now three, three and a half years ago, we've had seven years of experience building the company on much more complicated regulatory systems in Australia, in Hong Kong, Singapore and so on. Where is the e-money license holder or the MSB? Or like whatever is the local regulation that you need to become to be a fintech in almost all cases, which is much more arduous than in the US.
And then you have our approach is being in every region that we operate. I now think we have about more. We have more than 60 banks. And then of course the payment networks, then the different LCMs. And we are own liquidity provider. We have our own liquidity pools with for our effects. Right. So being able to build this like, you know, multiple financial partners, multiple bank multiple banking relationships globally, which is like very, very hard to do over time. And it's very hard to do it overnight. Right. So, and what we also do is like, you know, in all these jurisdictions we operate, we safeguard our customers funds. So, for whatever reason, even though we're at this scale, if for whatever reason, if tomorrow, God forbid, it doesn't exist, those customer funds are safeguarded. And like, you know, those funds are in really large bank accounts and safe. Right. So, we built the system in a way that is foolproof in some sense to all of this, because of the scale we had to build and at a payment company of this volume, as you know, it's mostly a volume game.
So we're trying to go down to be like, how much of this infrastructure can we own without being a bank itself? Right. So I mean, that's evident from what I mentioned. It's 130 plus billions of volume that we do. More than 90%, I believe, is 95% of that volume runs through the network that we've built, and the remaining 5% goes through SWIFT and whatnot. Right. So we had to do this. And again, I'm not saying we have all possible types of scenarios situation covered for but like, you know, because we had to operate for a good seven years of our existence in a far more complex environment where you are working with the regulators is regularly you are filing those reports. You are doing audits every year. And you know, we're a principal licensor for Visa in markets where you can. We have a multitude of banking partners, a big bank like JPMorgan or SCB or ANZ and then like a modern bank and so on.
So, our system is built on a lot of redundancies. And when you bring that into the US, we operate both models and bank sponsor model here too. Right. So that redundancy and these learnings outside of the US to be honest like make us a much stronger player in this space because I would say, like companies that have primarily roots in the US don't necessarily have the same expertise or don't have the same experience going through.
Lex Sokolin:
I think that makes sense. But I don't know that it completely de-risk the complexity, right? Like, what does the tech team look like to maintain all of these integrations, like of the 1700 people, if you look at the tech organization, what's the scale of that? And then how much is dedicated to making sure that the connectivity is there versus, you know, like new initiatives, user interfaces and so on. Because like, if I think about the aggregator industry, so whether it's plaid with data aggregation or whether it's invest nets and the amount of effort it takes just to maintain the ledgers to talk to each other.
And I imagine for Airwallex, like you have to have internally some sort of ledger that you're syncing everything to is really complex. And you can have hundreds and hundreds of people whose job it is to, I'd say, merely or just spend their time like making sure the connectors to all the things are working. So, can you give us a sense of that machine?
Ravi Adusumilli:
We have several hundred engineers that are split across multiple countries, so that we were able to keep up our network and add new features. So, our engineering team today is split between Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong and a large set of people who are in Shanghai, Singapore and also the US. Right. So, the way we think about it is there is a set of infrastructure that always needs to be kept up and all these connections that are into the different liquidity providers and liquidity pools and financial partners and so on. And then there is the new product development we do. We also have moved into a model of a product gap, right. Obviously, I have the PNL for the commercial part of Americas, but we're also having product leaders who have this ownership mindset.
So there is a product owner for our treasury network. So that team operates as a business unit where they have engineers, PMs, financial partnerships, salespeople and so on. So they run that entire treasury network we operate that is used by multiple products as a PNL, right. So, they know and are responsible for this. And similarly, we do that for you, and we have a core banking team that is also spread across multiple countries that builds into all these all these different connectors. So yes, you are right that it's very complex. A large percent of our engineering team is focused on the hygiene and the maintenance of all these hundreds of different connectors we have that brings together these Airwallex, infrastructure. But we also have hundreds of engineers building new products and new capabilities on top of that network. Right. Ultimately, that infrastructure is what makes it all special. And this this is not just, you know, to maintain this network, but also, we have to we have to have this capability of detecting fraud, of like having real time transaction monitoring so we can report anything that we see on a regular basis.
And we also have to file different SARS and so on to our regulators. So yes, I agree it is a very complex operation. But because we started on a journey to own the to own the infrastructure as much we as we can, instead of building this network of networks model or instead of like operating on someone else's network and whatnot, we own the overall payment network as much as we can, and we have to staff and build it in such a way. So we can do this, right? So yeah, it is very complex, but that's how we've been building one step at a time since our ten years existence.
Lex Sokolin:
To wrap up, let's imagine Airwallex in the future. In 2035 years from now, what do you think will be the scale of the business? And I'll throw a little bit of a curveball in there, which is around stablecoins. Jack was on social media recently with a bit of a pushback that stablecoins are going to be a meaningful part of the payment’s infrastructure. So, I'm curious. Like looking forward if you're trying to get that three x growth and continue multiplying to scale. Where do you think you're going to be in a saturated market? Like how far do you think the company gets? And then from a tech perspective, what is constructive if it's not stablecoins to the business?
Ravi Adusumilli:
I mean, I want to clarify in that I, I have seen what Jack said, and Jack likes engaging the community on he's not afraid of talking his mind. And it is a fact that today we don't have our customers asking us like, hey, when can you have stablecoins either pay in or pay out? Like, you know, when can you provide that? To me, it's not high priority today. But having said that, we are seeing regulatory clarity in obviously in the US and other Western markets, we don't see much of value, especially in the G10 currencies, because, as Jack was saying, in the most cases, we do operate a near instant network and you can't I mean, and the costs are pretty low, right? Like, as he's I think his famous quote was, you can't be cheaper than zero and you cannot be faster than instant.
Right. But having said that, I do see value in stablecoins in use cases like payroll, in countries where currency fluctuations are massive. The last mile. There are definitely use cases there. It just so happens it's not necessarily something we're seeing today in our use cases that we're solving. The question where it will be on in 2030. So, the company has been more than doubling over the last several years. And it's like, you know, we see a 90% growth year on year. So, you can just like compound that, like, you know, and what would it be in five years from now. So, where I would like us to see in five years from now is as much as I'm proud of how global we are. Lex, there are several markets that we still do not operate in. You know, like India, Japan. We're close. Korea. We're starting in LATAM. we just scratching the surface of a very, very large market. From a capability’s perspective. Lex, I would like us to be in all those major markets that were not there today.
And in terms of, ambitious goal of you mentioned like we're a certain size of Stripe today, but it's nothing to do with Stripe. But, you know, on our own, as we see this, as we see our business scaling, I like us to be at that, $1 trillion of payment volume across all the products that we serve. And we're also not just for the sake of using AI for the sake of it, but beyond customer support and beyond making our developers more efficient, we're also investing and building AI into our product. So, you know, by 2030 or even much, much sooner than that, hopefully you'll have a setup for products where you're a startup founder on day zero or day one, you'll have this financial operating system that we've been talking about. Available to you automatically in a generic finance world that you don't need to like, you know, integrate anything, you don't need to build anything. It just comes to you from Airwallex like, you know, or some other company to you.
Right. So, I expect us to be offering the choices of whatever financial products and services that you need anywhere in the world and the network that brings volume and scale. So, no matter what size and shape you are as a business, you can use any and all of us in terms of numbers. Yeah, I would like again, this isn't necessarily a company position, but I ambitiously would like us to be at a trillion volume and like, you know, whatever that brings in terms of revenue at the scale we are is what I'm hoping for us to be there in 2030.
Lex Sokolin:
That's a fascinating story, and I can't wait until we've got a trillion in volume for you. So that's exciting. If our listeners want to learn more about you or about the company, where should they go?
Ravi Adusumilli:
They can go to airwallex.com there. I'm also happy to engage with any of your listeners on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, Ravi Adusumilli or airwallex.com. I'm happy to double click on any of these things I mentioned, answer any questions and would love to reach out if they are looking for any needs that are not necessarily addressed today. So, thank you for the very insightful conversation. I really appreciate your time.
Lex Sokolin:
Wonderful. Thank you.
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