Airwallex appoints Pranav Sood as CFO ahead of an IPO

Published: 2026-06-29T11:38:11.000Z

When a fast growing technology company brings in a new chief financial officer, it is often the clearest signal of what comes next. The global payments platform Airwallex has appointed Pranav Sood as its CFO, a hire widely read as part of its long term preparations for an eventual stock market listing.

When a fast growing technology company brings in a new chief financial officer, it is often the clearest signal yet of what comes next, and in Airwallex's case the message is hard to miss. The global payments platform, founded in Melbourne and now one of the most valuable fintechs in the world, has appointed Pranav Sood as its chief financial officer, a hire widely read as part of its long term preparations for an eventual stock market listing. The CFO role is one of the most heavily scrutinised positions any company fills ahead of going public, since the person in the seat must turn a sprawling growth business into something investors can underwrite, and Airwallex is clearly assembling that machinery. The appointment is notable partly because it is a homecoming. Sood previously spent nearly three years at Airwallex, most recently leading its operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa as executive general manager, and briefly serving as interim global head of marketing, before leaving in late 2024 to join Bain Capital's growth equity arm as an operating partner scaling technology businesses across the UK and Europe. Bringing him back blends external investment perspective with deep familiarity with Airwallex's commercial engine, a combination chief executive Jack Zhang highlighted in describing the need for a CFO who is as much a commercial strategist as a financial steward. Sood will be based in London, oversee finance, corporate development and operations globally, and report directly into the company's next chapter. The timing sits within a flurry of corporate momentum. Airwallex recently raised 320 million dollars in a Series H round that lifted its valuation to around 11 billion dollars, and it has committed roughly 1.1 billion dollars to expanding across EMEA, including plans to recruit about 100 senior engineers in the UK and the Netherlands. The company reported annualised revenue of 1.3 billion dollars in March, up 74 per cent year on year, alongside 287 billion dollars in annualised transaction volume, and it has been buying capability too, having acquired the revenue recognition and reconciliation specialist Leapfin. Sood's job will be to ensure all that capital and acquisition activity translates into durable, profitable growth rather than just scale for its own sake. The strategic backdrop is Airwallex's bet on what it calls the agentic economy. Zhang has argued that the licenses, local network integrations and settlement rails the company spent a decade constructing are precisely the infrastructure that AI driven, autonomous finance will need, and Airwallex is investing heavily in AI native financial products. A listing, when market conditions allow, would give it the currency and profile to compete at the very top of global payments against rivals like Stripe. The regional thread runs directly through Sood's own background. His remit at Airwallex spanned the Middle East, and the company has been steadily building its presence across the Gulf, where cross border payments, multi currency accounts and business banking are in heavy demand among the region's fast internationalising companies. As Saudi Arabia and the UAE push their firms to trade and expand globally, platforms like Airwallex that simplify moving money across borders are increasingly relevant, and a CFO who knows the region first hand is unlikely to overlook it as the company scales towards a public listing.