For nearly a decade, Airwallex has quietly carved its path as one of Australia’s most ambitious fintechs, building a global network for moving money behind the scenes. Now, the company is stepping onto a new stage: in-person payments. With this move, Airwallex sharpens its competition with Stripe in digital transactions and, for the first time, stands toe-to-toe with juggernauts like Square and Adyen in one of financial technology’s final frontiers.
Their new offering is more than just another point-of-sale terminal. Airwallex claims it gives businesses something competitors don’t—a single platform to accept in-person payments across multiple countries, sidestepping the need for separate local vendor agreements at every turn.
“In practice, expanding into a new country is a logistical labyrinth,” says CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang. “You’re forced to sign on a local payments partner, untangle separate compliance hurdles, and keep juggling yet another vendor relationship.” The weariness is evident in his voice.
Rewind to 2019, and Stripe was prepared to bring Airwallex under its wing for $1.2 billion. That was with Airwallex posting barely $2 million in annual revenue. Zhang even admits he said “yes” after months of negotiation. But something shifted. “When I flew home to Melbourne, I went deep on what kept me building Airwallex in the first place,” he remembers. The deal fell apart—not out of bravado, but a quiet conviction.
Frustration with the complexity and cost of moving money internationally is what spurred Zhang to launch Airwallex in 2015. While most fintechs bolted on to existing financial systems, Airwallex put in the laborious work of building its own rails—laying the foundation for its global ambitions, piece by meticulous piece.
Today, the startup is valued at $8 billion. Investors say annualized revenue has soared to $1.3 billion, growing at an astonishing clip of 85% a year. Over 46,000 U.S. firms now use Airwallex, collectively moving $100 billion through its pipes each year.
What sets Airwallex squarely apart is its sprawling regulatory footprint. The company touts ownership of nearly 90 regulatory licenses, stretching across around 50 countries and linking directly to payment systems in 120+ markets. It can settle funds in 90 currencies. According to Zhang, rivals like Stripe and Square lack this bedrock—particularly when it comes to holding client funds locally. “Stripe and Square can process a transaction in Japan. But the instant the payment clears, the money has to be pushed out to the merchant’s bank account. You can’t keep it in the market—you can’t move it the way your business really needs,” he says. Securing Airwallex’s own banking license in Japan, no small feat, took seven relentless years.
Now, with their new point-of-sale product, all of that backend groundwork comes into play at the shop counter. Businesses can connect physical and online sales on one interface, access unified reporting, and tie payments directly into their back-office systems. For a multinational chain, having each store run on disparate local payment systems—each with its own paperwork and management headaches—simply becomes obsolete.
Adyen, a Dutch payments powerhouse, has a similar pitch—building global infrastructure so multinationals can operate efficiently. On the other side, industry giants like Fiserv or the combined Global Payments/Worldpay still dominate the legacy retail world, though with far older systems.
The open question: Will businesses already locked into Stripe or Square be willing to retrace years of systems integration for the sake of cleaner infrastructure? Airwallex is betting they will, especially as frustrations mount for companies tangled in a thicket of local payment vendors.
“There hasn’t really been a genuine rival to Stripe in the last fifteen years,” Zhang reflects. “Which is wild, when you think about just how vast this industry is.” Now, Airwallex wants to be that rival—not by chasing surface innovation, but by rebuilding the actual roads money travels on, one license, and one market at a time.
