Easy like Sunday Morning

Jack Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Airwallex, helps businesses move money around the world with ease. Here, he talks about his past as a magazine editor and the things that make him truly happy

- Tara Sobti

Airwallex was launched by its CEO Jack Zhang and four friends after paying exorbitant foreign exchange fees for online purchases. The company, founded in Melbourne and headquartered in Hong Kong, is a global payments platform that helps businesses manage and make international payments quickly, transparently and cost-efficiently, without the constraints of the traditional financial system. Today, Airwallex is a unicorn with more than 1,400 employees across 20 locations, supporting 100,000 businesses globally. Investors include bigwigs like Sequoia Capital and Tencent.

Before establishing Airwallex, Zhang worked in the banking industry and founded various businesses including an import-export company and a café; it was an attempt to buy supplies online for the latter that prompted the founding of Airwallex. Here, he shares his story.

Describe what you do.

Airwallex is global financial infrastructure that powers modern businesses to grow beyond borders. I set a vision for the company and lead its global expansion.

How does your work make a difference?

When you think about how businesses and people moved money before Airwallex, it was made up of a lot of wire or Swift transfers [whose infrastructure] was built in the 1970s. It’s slow, expensive and not very convenient. With Airwallex, we built a parallel infrastructure to connect to real-time payment networks around the world; with Airwallex, it is much faster and cheaper to move money globally. You can receive money in more than 65 countries and accept payments in more than 180 countries, leveraging our proprietary payment network.

Tell us about the genesis of Airwallex.