Airwallex, the Australian fintech that spent a decade building global payments infrastructure, is moving into in-person commerce. The company is launching a point-of-sale product it says rivals like Stripe and Square cannot yet match across borders.
Airwallex, the Australian fintech that has spent roughly a decade assembling its own global payments infrastructure from the ground up, is now making its move into in-person commerce. The company is launching a point-of-sale product that it says solves a problem none of its major rivals have adequately addressed: allowing businesses to accept physical payments across multiple countries through a single platform, without the need to sign up with a local payment provider in every new market they enter.
The announcement puts Airwallex in direct competition with Stripe, Square, and Adyen on what many observers consider one of the last significant battlegrounds in financial technology. While Stripe has dominated the online payments conversation for years and Square has built a formidable position in physical retail, neither has cracked the complexity of truly unified cross-border commerce in the way Airwallex is now claiming to have done. CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang has been candid about the infrastructure gap his company believes it has built around. His argument is that competitors can process a payment in Japan, for example, but immediately need to pay out to a local bank account because they lack the licensing to hold funds within the market. Airwallex's Japanese license, which took seven years to obtain, allows it to do exactly that.
The depth of Airwallex's regulatory groundwork is central to its pitch. The company holds close to 90 regulatory licenses across 70 to 80 regions globally and maintains direct connections to local payment networks in more than 120 countries. This infrastructure allows it to settle transactions in over 90 currencies and, critically, to hold and deploy funds within specific markets rather than repatriating them immediately. That distinction matters considerably for international retailers, franchise operators, and hospitality businesses that run stores across multiple jurisdictions and currently manage a different payment stack in each one.
Zhang's decision to keep building independently is itself an interesting part of the company's story. In 2019, Stripe approached Airwallex with an acquisition offer worth $1.2 billion, at a time when Airwallex had just $2 million in revenue. Zhang initially agreed to the deal but reversed course after flying home to Melbourne and revisiting what originally motivated him to build the company. He founded Airwallex in 2015 out of personal frustration with the cost and friction of moving money across borders, and the acquisition would have ended that mission before it had materially advanced. That decision, which could easily have looked like a mistake at the time, has aged well. The company is now valued at $8 billion by its investors, claims annualized revenue of approximately $1.3 billion growing at roughly 85% year over year, serves more than 46,000 US businesses, and processes $100 billion in annual volume.
The new point-of-sale product extends Airwallex's existing digital infrastructure to physical retail environments. The platform connects in-store and online payments, offers consolidated reporting across markets, and integrates directly into back-office systems. For a retail business running stores in multiple countries, the appeal is operational simplicity: one platform, one reconciliation process, and one set of vendor relationships instead of the usual patchwork of local arrangements. That proposition is not entirely without precedent. Adyen has long made a version of this argument to global enterprise clients, and it remains Airwallex's most comparable competitor in terms of cross-border ambition. The difference, according to Zhang, is the depth of Airwallex's own licensing in each market rather than reliance on local partner networks.
The timing of the physical payments push also reflects how the boundaries between payments, banking, and software continue to collapse. What began as a cross-border transfer tool has evolved into a full financial operating system for globally active businesses, covering multi-currency accounts, spend management, corporate cards, and now point-of-sale. The pattern mirrors how Stripe expanded from a developer-friendly payment API into a broad financial infrastructure platform, suggesting that the end state for serious payments companies is full-stack coverage of the entire money movement lifecycle.
Airwallex's push into the physical world lands at a particularly relevant moment for the MENA region, where the company has been making concrete moves to build a licensed, operational presence. Airwallex received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE for stored value and retail payment services licenses, enabling it to offer multi-currency accounts, global transfers, payment acceptance, and corporate cards to UAE customers. Simultaneously, it established a new entity in Saudi Arabia with approval from the Ministry of Investment, aligning the company directly with the Kingdom's Vision 2030 digital economy agenda. Airwallex has also committed more than $1 billion to its expansion across the Middle East and EMEA, signaling that the region is a strategic priority rather than a peripheral market. To strengthen its local relevance, the company partnered with Tabby, the Gulf's leading buy now, pay later provider, to offer installment payment options at checkout for merchants in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia. As Airwallex now moves into in-person payments globally, the regulatory groundwork it has laid in the Gulf positions it well to extend that physical commerce offering into a region where cross-border retail, international hospitality brands, and digitally native consumers represent exactly the kind of merchants its new POS product is designed to serve.
Whether Airwallex can convert its infrastructure advantage into meaningful market share in physical retail remains an open question. The incumbents it is targeting are not standing still, and physical payments is a scale game where existing merchant relationships and brand familiarity carry significant weight. But for businesses already frustrated by the cost and complexity of managing fragmented payment systems across borders, a single platform that genuinely works the same way in every market is a compelling reason to consider switching.
