As most companies were trying to figure out how to handle the economic downturn Airwallex was able to raise $160mn; the company is creating an entirely new infrastructure to replace the traditional pipes of the global payments system, now dominated by Belgium-based Swift; ”The existing system is inefficient and fragmentary,” said Lucy Liu, Airwallex’s co-founder, to the FT. “And while we want to build our own payments platform, both for settlement and payment, we want to work with banks and other financial institutions.”; regulation could be the biggest barrier to global adoption since the various jurisdictions they aim to operate in have different rules; the company is off to a good start by working with powerful partners as it is backed by Tencent, Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, DST, Mastercard, ANZ, BCA and Salesforce; Swift took five decades to build into what it is today, Airwallex still has a way to go but is off to a fast start to overhaul a pain point for many businesses. Financial Times.
