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Jack Zhang is the CEO & Co-Founder of Airwallex, a global payments and treasury giant that moves $7 billion in monthly transaction volume and serves 100,000+ clients, including Brex, Rippling, and SHEIN.
Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Airwallex was last valued at $5.5 billion and has raised 900 million dollars from Sequoia, DST, Square Peg, Greenoaks, Mastercard, Tencent, Salesforce, and many more.
In this episode, we discuss:
How opening a coffee shop led him to co-found a global payments network
The first days of Airwallex can be traced back to a Melbourne coffee shop owned by Jack and his co-founders. Faced with the high fees and inefficiencies of making international purchases of coffee beans, they came across a gap in the market for global payments and brewed the strategy to build a cheaper and better international payments platform. With a background in banking and FX trading, they leveraged their understanding of market-making algorithms and the outdated SWIFT system to innovate global financial transfers and overhaul the process.
Why Airwallex prioritizes people with great leadership skills who are also technical and can code
“If you're an engineering manager, you need to be the best engineer in the team and also be able to communicate with stakeholders well.”
Airwallex leaders are expected not only to be great individual contributors and have profound depth of knowledge and skill in their fields, but also have the ability to understand and contribute across a broad spectrum of the business. The goal is to foster a culture of big-picture understanding of the business strategy and how each person’s contributions relate to it.
The impact of AI in financial services and new risks of AI-powered financial fraud
“The impact of AI is gonna be a lot more on the software side than the infrastructure side. At the end of the day, money movement is moving $1 from country to country. The best, the ultimate experience is real time and it's free, and we have already achieved that.”
AI's most significant impact in financial services will mean revolutionizing the software layer and operational processes made by financial companies and teams. Airwallex has already been integrating AI across various roles within the company and they have seen significant progress in drastically reducing the learning curve for new employees and improving efficiency for the workforce. This is only the beginning, but AI's role in automating and refining these aspects of the business is already redefining the standards of service and operational excellence in the sector.
That said, it’s not all great news when it comes to AI. One of the most worrying fraud use-cases comes from deepfake technology. A new frontier of challenges in financial services is emerging and Zhang has already witnessed deepfakes impersonating bank officials to deceive customers. As AI technology evolves, its application in fraud detection and prevention will become an increasingly vital component for Airwallex and the rest of the financial industry.
Partnering and working with almost 100 banks around the world… and a lot more!
“A lot of people kind of challenge me or like, you know, Blockchain or crypto, you know, my answer is, you cannot be faster than instant, we cannot be cheaper than free. So, what problem are you solving.”
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