😱 Australia🇦🇺: Airwallex aims to challenge Stripe and Ramp in the global payments market

😱 Australia🇦🇺: Airwallex aims to challenge Stripe and Ramp in the global payments market

Founded in 2015, fintech company Airwallex specializes in cross-border payments for businesses, enabling international transactions between companies, suppliers and employees. The company was founded by Jack Zhang, an entrepreneur of Chinese origin, and is currently valued at approximately USD 11 billion.

🤔 Growth: Airwallex's rapid expansion began in 2018, when it started offering foreign exchange conversion and mass international payout services to large companies. That same year, Stripe attempted to acquire the company for 1.2 billion USD, but the offer was rejected.

🤔 International expansion: today, Airwallex serves 300,000 customers across 47 countries, including China🇨🇳, Japan🇯🇵, the United Kingdom🇬🇧, Mexico🇲🇽 and the United States🇺🇸. Approximately 61% of its business is generated in the Asia-Pacific region. Its core strategy is to build proprietary payment rails connected directly to central banks and local clearing systems, reducing reliance on the SWIFT correspondent banking network.

🤔 Artificial intelligence: the company has integrated AI-powered tools to help customers optimize corporate expense management. In the coming weeks, it plans to launch T:0, a new solution designed to automate financial processes such as accounting, financial reconciliation, and financial forecasting. By bringing together bank accounts, payments and corporate cards on a single platform, Airwallex aims to simplify companies' financial operations.

🤔 Crypto: Airwallex is incubating Metal, a startup developing blockchain infrastructure for tokenized financial assets. The project aims to leverage stablecoins to make payment processing more efficient.

🤔 Competition: Airwallex is positioning its product ecosystem as a direct competitor to Stripe and Ramp. However, both companies continue to hold a strong position in the market. Stripe processed USD 1.9 trillion in payments last year, while Ramp recently reported an annualized payment volume of USD 200 billion. By comparison, Airwallex had processed approximately USD 250 billion as of March 2026.

🤔 Geopolitical context: competition has also spilled over into the political arena. In December 2025, one of Ramp'sCEOs alleged on X that Airwallex transferred data belonging to U.S. users to China, citing the company's workforce in China and investments from Tencent and HSG (formerly Sequoia China) as evidence. In response, on June 9, 2026, founder Jack Zhang dismissed the allegations as baseless. Australian regulators subsequently launched an audit of the company.

#news #Australia #China #USA #crypto

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