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[Original air date, April 9, 2024] 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 $6.1 billion and has raised over a billion dollars from Sequoia, DST, Square Peg, Greenoaks, Mastercard, Tencent, Salesforce, and many more.
Since the recording of this interview, Airwallex announced a $300 million raise at a $6.2 billion valuation in May 2025. Additionally, Jack recently made waves posting a public criticism about stablecoin hype (read Jack’s Twtter post or LinkedIn post). He argues that stablecoins don't reduce cross-border payment costs because off-ramping to fiat is often more expensive than traditional FX markets. Zhang questions their utility for B2B transactions, noting Airwallex already moves money in real time at costs below 0.01% - "you can't be cheaper than free or faster than instant." He sees stablecoins as hype over substance, calling crypto "a religion rather than technology."
Q&A With Jack Zhang
The following is a summarized transcript of the interview recorded in April 2024
Miguel Armaza: Jack, let's start with your personal story. I know you have quite an interesting journey that led to founding Airwallex. Can you take us through how a coffee shop led you to co-found a global payments network?
Jack Zhang: I was born in China and moved to Australia when I was 15. After working in investment banking and trading for close to a decade, I co-founded and invested in several businesses, including a coffee business - think of it like a Blue Bottle in Australia. With that business, we were purchasing coffee beans from Brazil and Indonesia, and packages from China. We experienced very high fees and bad user experience with international payments. That's how we found the problem of cross-border payments, and it led me and my college friend to found Airwallex to solve this problem.
Miguel Armaza: How did you go from running a coffee shop to building a payments business? They couldn't be more different operationally.
Jack Zhang: My background is in banking and trading, so I know FX trading pretty well. I'd been building market-making algorithmic trading FX engines. My co-founder and I are engineers, and we spent time understanding how correspondent banking and the SWIFT system works. The system was built in the 1970s and has been around for over 50 years. The entire network is built on top of banks that have bilateral relationships.
If I wanted to send money from National Australia Bank to a bank in São Paulo, these two banks likely don't have a bilateral relationship, so they go through intermediary correspondent banks like Citi or Bank of America. The smaller the bank you're trying to send payment to, the more likelihood you'll have more intermediary banks in the middle, which charge fees and slow down the process.
We looked at it from a first-principles perspective. If there are real-time payment systems around the world - like NPP in Australia, Faster Payments in the UK, or FPS in Hong Kong - and we can connect to all these local currency systems through central banks and interconnect them into a global network, we should be able to get rid of all the intermediary banks, ultimately reducing fees and increasing efficiency. Our vision is moving money globally in real time, which we're already doing for more than half the transactions we process today.
Miguel Armaza: What advantages does it bring to have a CEO who is also an engineer?
Jack Zhang: I think the best founders I've met around the world can both go wide and go deep. I also require my direct reports and leadership at Airwallex to both go wide and go deep. There are a lot of people who, once they become managers or leaders, develop generalized skill sets - they can do everything but can't go deep in many things, which probably doesn't work at Airwallex.
Every leader here needs to be an individual contributor first. For example, if you're an engineering manager, you need to be the best engineer on the team and also be able to communicate with stakeholders well, have a sense of product and customers. Before you become a leader in the company, you have to be one of the best coders. That's been our philosophy from day one.
Miguel Armaza: There's often this narrative that it's banks versus fintechs. But I don't think you agree with that. What's your perspective on how banks and fintechs should work together?
Jack Zhang: Airwallex partners with more than 80 banks around the world, whether it's JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, Barclays, or Deutsche Bank. There are very few banks we don't actually partner with. We work with them closely in every single country. In many countries, they are the sponsor for us to access the local currency system.
We need more than one provider in each country because we need redundancy. When one bank has technical issues or different risk appetites, we need to be able to route transactions that comply not only with regulation but also with the risk appetite of each bank.
I think ultimately, banks are in the balance sheet business, where Airwallex is in the transaction software business. We have different roles to play. We're better than incumbents at delivering better customer experience. If you get onboarded with Airwallex, you can create bank accounts around the world and immediately start transacting, where the infrastructure is actually powered by 80-plus banks.
Miguel Armaza: You operate in highly regulated markets across many countries. What have you learned about dealing with different regulations around the world?
Jack Zhang: We're regulated in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, India, Japan, UK, Europe, Canada, and the US across 50 states. We've bought companies in markets where we couldn't apply for licenses directly. For example, in Hong Kong, they generally don't issue new licenses, so we bought a company for over 100 million Hong Kong dollars just for the license, and it took another three years to get approval just to change control.
In Australia, we're regulated by four different regulators. In Hong Kong, we're regulated by multiple authorities for different services. It's very complicated regulatory infrastructure, which is kind of our superpower, because we're good at building innovation while staying transparent with regulators and compliant with laws and regulations around the world.
The biggest lesson is full transparency - not withholding any information so you're not surprised later. Building trust and confidence with different regulators around the world through proactive communication has been key to our success.
Miguel Armaza: Real-time payment networks are becoming interoperable across borders. In a world where that becomes table stakes, how does that change the landscape?
Jack Zhang: We've already integrated with all the real-time payment systems around the world - NPP, FedNow in the US, UPI in India, PIX in Brazil, and others. As a fintech, we're innovating faster and focusing on customer experience more than incumbents, so we're able to get to market first and capture more market share.
I haven't seen anything meaningful in terms of large-scale cross-border partnerships. Essentially, you're talking about countries and central banks working together, which is a complicated process and will be very slow. It might happen, but in small scale. I can't see signs of large-scale global cooperation in the current complicated geopolitical landscape.
Miguel Armaza: How do you keep 1,400 employees focused and rowing in the same direction across so many countries?
Jack Zhang: Because we're in so many countries and so distributed, multicultural, and diversified, the only way to do that is to become loosely coupled and localized as much as you can. We use a general manager model - we have general managers for EMEA, Americas, and APAC.
Our general managers are more like mini-CEOs of their regions. They manage marketing, legal, compliance, regulatory relationships, and look at M&A opportunities. They're almost like independent operating companies, but highly aligned on vision and loosely coupled in terms of day-to-day operations.
Miguel Armaza: Let's talk about AI. How are you leveraging recent innovations within Airwallex, and what's your macro view on AI's impact on fintech?
Jack Zhang: I think the impact of AI will be much more on the software side than the infrastructure side. End of the day, money movement is moving $1 from country to country. The ultimate experience is real time and free, which we've already achieved. We're moving close to $200 billion this year, and over 80% of transactions are going to be real time, and we're doing that for customers for free.
A lot of people challenge me about blockchain or crypto. My answer is: you cannot be faster than instant, you cannot be cheaper than free. So what problem are you solving?
The biggest impact is on the software layer and company operations. We're building different copilots - coding copilots, customer support AI, tech support AI for onboarding new employees. The learning curve becomes much shorter, efficiency becomes much greater. For customer support, we can respond much better than 18 months ago with generative AI.
You can create knowledge bases, apply different language models, and train them better. You can create specialized models for different types of issues. From a product perspective, with all the data we have, customers could just say, "Give me the cash flow forecast for the next four months filtered down to this country and team," and immediately get the outcome they need.
Miguel Armaza: Are you worried about the role of AI when it comes to financial fraud?
Jack Zhang: Definitely. I've already seen some deepfakes in one country where fraudsters pretended to be a bank and had a call with customers to onboard them and move money away. They were using deepfake AI in a video call, pretending to be a bank working with Airwallex's infrastructure, pitching to customers to open an Airwallex account. It's quite scary.
We're still in the process of improving our algorithms. When onboarding customers, we do live video chats, and identifying whether that's a real person or deepfake is definitely challenging. We haven't seen fraud at scale yet. Generally, once we see one or two fraud attempts with different patterns, our systems are good enough to pick it up, and we can iterate quickly to respond.
Miguel Armaza: You've also raised money to invest in the next generation of founders through Capital 49. Tell me about that initiative.
Jack Zhang: It's an ecosystem fund called Capital 49. The idea is to back companies in the Airwallex ecosystem, whether fintech or software companies that want to ultimately change the world and provide better consumer or business experiences.
Airwallex's vision is to be the single platform to empower businesses to grow beyond borders and operate in a digital-native world without traditional infrastructure constraints. Part of that is helping them access capital. We're launching our credit product and have the VC fund as different ways to enable our customers to grow their business beyond traditional infrastructure constraints.
If we succeed, we get the upside as well. Shein has been a customer since 2016, and I wish we had invested in them early - now they're close to $100 billion in valuation.
Miguel Armaza: What does your typical customer base look like today?
Jack Zhang: We have two business lines. One is our financial operating system - think Google for banking but with software experiences to empower global operations, whether expense management, reimbursement, treasury management, or subscriptions. We service e-commerce, technology companies, startups, tech-savvy professional services, and travel companies - generally from a few employees to a few thousand employees.
The other side is our embedded finance platform called Scale, which enables companies like Brex, Rippling, Jeeves, Airbase, and Gusto to build products and services for their customers globally. We've enabled payroll companies, fintech companies, and marketplaces with complicated money movement and regulatory complexity to go global and build better customer experiences.
Miguel Armaza: What's your outlook on the fintech industry broadly?
Jack Zhang: People think fintech is a massive market with lots of opportunities, but they don't realize fintech is also a low-margin, highly complicated business. To create a scalable, profitable fintech business, you need massive scale because you have to deal with risks, transaction monitoring, regulatory compliance, ledger systems, and core banking systems.
To do this globally, you still have to build all of this in-house, especially when you want to achieve the best customer experience. Fintech requires scale and capital to succeed. We're quite fortunate to be in a position where we can scale now with network effects.
I think there are a dozen fintechs in the world that will become $100 billion businesses in the next decade or two. It takes longer than consumer businesses that have viral effects, but there's massive upside. People are underestimating the ability for these companies to scale once they achieve the necessary scale and regulatory infrastructure.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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