How does Airwallex work?

Key takeaways

• Airwallex is a global financial platform that brings account, payments, spend, billing and financial-operations workflows together in one place, so Australian businesses can collect, hold, convert, pay and reconcile money without stitching together separate providers.

• The platform now spans five connected areas – Business Accounts, Spend, Payments, Billing, and Platform APIs and Embedded Finance – with AI-assisted tools helping teams process expenses, bills and approvals faster.

• Availability, pricing and specific features depend on your plan, entity, market and eligibility, so this guide flags where that applies rather than assuming every business gets every feature.

What is Airwallex?

Airwallex is a global financial platform that helps businesses manage accounts, payments, spend, billing and financial operations from one place. For an Australian business, that typically means collecting money from local and overseas customers, holding it in different currencies, converting and transferring funds, paying suppliers and staff, managing company spend, billing customers, and syncing all of it to your accounting system.

Airwallex is not a bank. It holds an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL No. 487221) and is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). Some capabilities described below – such as a business account or specific payment methods – are available on eligible plans, entities and markets rather than universally, so check the current Business Account and pricing pages for your specific situation.

The platform at a glance

• Business Accounts. Local and global account details, receiving funds, holding currencies, transfers, FX, cards and Yield.

• Spend. Company and employee cards, expenses, reimbursements, Bill Pay, purchase controls, approvals and spend visibility.

• Payments. Online checkout, payment links, plugins, local payment methods, fraud and authentication tools, and payment APIs.

• Billing. Invoicing, subscription management and usage-based billing for charging your customers.

• Platform APIs and Embedded Finance. Programmable accounts, payments, payouts, FX and card issuing for platforms and businesses building financial workflows into their own products.

These aren't five separate products bolted together – instead, they're connected capabilities that share the same multi-currency wallet, so money collected in one area can be spent, converted or paid out in another without manual transfers between systems. Airwallex also includes AI-assisted workflows for selected expense, accounts-payable and support tasks, though not every customer or plan has access to every AI capability.

Open Global Accounts and get paid like a local

Global Accounts are the "receive, hold, convert and move money" part of the platform. Australian businesses can open local currency accounts with local bank details in 20+ currencies and receive funds like a local business from 70+ countries.

• Hold and spend in the same currency. Once funds land in your Global Account, you can hold them in that currency rather than converting straight back to AUD. This is useful if you're paying an overseas supplier or funding expenses in the same currency you collected.

• Direct debit in and out is available on Global Accounts across all plans.

• Transfers. Send free local transfers to 120+ countries, or SWIFT transfers to 200+ countries (note SWIFT fees apply), trading across 60+ currencies at interbank rates plus a transparent margin (0.5% above interbank for major currencies, 1% for others).

• Scheduling and control. You can set up future-dated transfers and choose to lock in the FX rate upfront or confirm it on the transfer date. Cancellation eligibility, fees and FX treatment vary by transfer type and timing, so check the specifics in-app before relying on it.

Let’s look at an example: an Australian eCommerce business receives AUD and USD from customers, holds the USD balance, pays a US-based supplier directly in USD, and transfers the AUD balance to its operating account – without converting currency twice.

Earn returns on AUD and USD with Yield

Airwallex Yield lets you earn a return on AUD and USD balances sitting in your Business Account, with no minimum lock-up period. You can move funds between your cash balance and Yield at any time, and returns accrue daily. Your balance and returns sync to Xero in real-time for reconciliation and instant withdrawals are also available (note a 0.2% fee for withdrawals applies on the Explore plan).

Yield is different from a savings account. Yield is an investment product, not a deposit account or a savings account, and it isn't guaranteed interest. Your funds are invested in JP Morgan Liquidity Funds, AAA-rated money market funds.

Scale globally with AI-powered Spend Management

Spend is where you control and understand company expenditure – cards, expenses, bills and purchase intent – across every entity you run.

Cards and expenses

Issue virtual and physical company and employee cards, funded from your multi-currency wallet, with no international transaction fees on Explore, Grow and Accelerate plans. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported. You can set controls by merchant category, currency, time period and transaction limit, freeze or cancel cards in real time, and let employees submit expenses from the mobile app with reimbursement in their local currency and sync to your accounting software.

Bill Pay, purchase orders and approvals

It's easy to mix these up, so to be clear:

• Bill Pay is accounts payable – paying your suppliers and managing incoming bills.

• Billing (covered further down) is accounts receivable – charging your own customers.

Bill Pay lets you upload, email or sync bills from your accounting software, automate approval routing, and pay vendors internationally at competitive FX rates. Purchase Orders and Requests add controls over purchase intent and approvals before a bill is even raised, connecting through to Bill Pay where supported.

Automation, analytics and AI

Available capabilities, with plan qualifiers where relevant:

• AI receipt and bill processing extracts fields, categorises expenses, matches bills to purchase orders and routes approvals.

• Spend Overview and Analytics gives finance teams a central view of spend by amount, category and person, with custom analytics views.

• Rules-based expense automation maps department, location, user and card conditions to accounting values and applies multi-condition rules automatically to future expenses.

• Expense Policy Agent, available on Grow and Accelerate plans, reviews employee-card expenses and reimbursements for issues such as duplicates, missing fields, incorrect values, currency mismatches, and breaches of configured limits, deadlines or budgets – citing the relevant policy section. It supports multi-entity, multi-currency and multi-language teams. Importantly, it flags issues for a human reviewer rather than blocking or approving spend itself.

• Eligible admins can describe an approval rule in plain language and get a draft workflow for card expenses, reimbursements, bills, card requests or purchase orders – but the workflow only goes live once an admin reviews and saves it.

None of Airwallex's AI tools make autonomous spending decisions, approve or block transactions on their own, or move money without a person confirming it – they're built to speed up the parts of expense and bill management that are otherwise manual.

Accept payments globally and keep more of your revenue

This is the "get paid by your customers" side of Airwallex: online checkout, payment links, hosted pages, no-code plugins, embedded components, and full API and mobile SDK integration, depending on how much control your developers want.

• 160+ local and global payment methods across 180+ countries, including major cards, digital wallets and regional methods – availability depends on your merchant entity and your customer's location.

• Local-currency pricing and like-for-like settlement. Price and collect in your customer's local currency and hold the proceeds in that same currency rather than converting immediately, where supported.

• Payment optimisation and fraud tools, including adaptive 3D Secure logic, adjustable risk thresholds, network tokenisation, saved payment details, and local acquiring in 35+ markets to lift acceptance rates and reduce cross-border card fees.

• Pricing: 1.65% + A$0.30 for domestic cards, 3.40% + A$0.30 for international cards, and A$0.30 plus the relevant payment-method fee for local payment methods.

In-person (POS) payments are also launching soon in Australia.

Maximise revenue with Airwallex Billing

Billing is the accounts receivable side of the platform – charging and collecting from your own customers – distinct from Bill Pay, which handles what you owe your suppliers.

• Invoicing: One-off and recurring invoices, instant invoice charging, automated payment reminders, credit notes and refunds, multi-entity billing, and automatic reconciliation. Invoicing itself is free.

• Subscription Management: Flat-fee, per-unit and graduated-tier pricing, multiple billing frequencies within a single subscription, free trials and discounts, intelligent dunning and payment retries, and mid-cycle upgrades or downgrades. Charged at 0.50% per successful transaction.

• Usage-based Billing: Meter consumption such as API calls, active users, gigabytes or AI tokens, ingest usage via API, aggregate it over a billing period, and calculate invoices for pay-as-you-go or hybrid pricing. Also charged at 0.50% per successful transaction.

Billing connects directly to the payments side of Airwallex: you can invoice a customer, let them pay with a supported local payment method, and have the collection reconcile automatically – it's not limited to recurring card payments.

Get visibility and control over global employee spend

In practice, the employee spend workflow looks like this: issue a card, apply controls, an employee makes a purchase, they submit or the app captures the receipt, finance reviews the expense, reimbursement happens if needed, and the result syncs to your accounting system.

This includes company and employee cards (virtual and physical), multi-currency wallet funding, merchant/category/time-based controls, real-time freeze and cancel, mobile submission, and accounting sync. If you're looking at card issuing for a platform or marketplace you're building – rather than for your own team – that's an embedded-finance capability covered under Platform APIs below, not a standard Business Account feature.

Sync your finances with integrations that do the work for you

Xero, QuickBooks and NetSuite remain Airwallex's core accounting integrations, syncing bank feeds, expenses and bills depending on your plan. On Accelerate plans, this extends to advanced NetSuite integration and HRIS platform integrations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is also supported with a native multi-currency, multi-entity bank feed – relevant if you're a larger Australian business already on that stack.

For eCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento are the primary plugin integrations for Australian merchants.

The real benefit isn't the logo list – it's that transactions, payment events, fees, refunds and expenses flow into your finance system automatically, so your team spends less time exporting spreadsheets and manually matching records.

Unlock Platform APIs and Embedded Finance

This is a different audience to the standard Business Account: Platform APIs and Embedded Finance are built for platforms, marketplaces, SaaS companies, fintechs and businesses that want to build financial workflows into their own product, rather than just use Airwallex's dashboard directly. Across the API suite, Airwallex supports accepting payments in 180+ countries, transferring funds to 200+ countries, and issuing local cards in 60+ countries – availability varies by capability and market.

• Connected Accounts. Programmatic onboarding, KYC/AML/sanctions screening, multi-currency wallets, local account details, payment acceptance, payouts and card issuing for your customers.

• Accounts. Create and manage multi-currency accounts at scale, including AUD accounts.

• Payments. One-time and recurring pay-ins, local payment methods, local-currency pricing and like-for-like settlement.

• Transactional FX. Interbank pricing, rate locking, settlement-date controls and currency-risk management.

• Payouts. Local and SWIFT payouts, beneficiary validation, webhook tracking and batch payments.

• Issuing. Single-use and multi-use cards, card controls, and white-label issuing.

• Banking as a Service, Global Treasury and Payments for Platforms. Collect, hold, convert, split and disburse funds for marketplaces, SaaS platforms and fintechs building their own financial products, without needing separate PayFac registration.

• Organisation and multi-account APIs. For multi-entity businesses managing Spend and Billing resources and API keys across several accounts.

Spend APIs are currently in public beta with a general availability target later in 2026 – treat this as an emerging capability rather than a finished product if you're planning an integration today. Platform-only capabilities aren't included in a standard Business Account plan, so check with the Airwallex team on eligibility and custom pricing before assuming a feature applies to you.

Is Airwallex safe?

Airwallex prioritises the security of your business and your business finances above all else.

We take a comprehensive approach to security:

Regulatory compliance 

Airwallex holds an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL No. 487221) and is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC).

Fund protection 

Airwallex protects your funds by arranging for major APRA-regulated bank(s) to provide bank guarantee(s) for an amount covering your entire wallet balance. Your funds are safeguarded in line with local regulations where Airwallex operates.

Advanced security infrastructure 

Our best-in-class security controls are monitored 24/7, and we meet the highest international security standards, including PCI DSS, SOC1, and SOC2 compliance.

Trusted financial partners 

We hold your money with leading global financial institutions to ensure maximum security.

How your business can grow with Airwallex

Rather than another feature list, here's what a combined workflow can look like for an Australian ecommerce or SaaS business:

1. Collect AUD and selected foreign currencies through Global Accounts or Payments.

2. Price and accept online payments using supported local payment methods.

3. Hold funds in the relevant currency and convert only when needed.

4. Pay overseas suppliers and contractors, using scheduled transfers or rate controls where useful.

5. Issue cards and apply Spend controls to employee and marketing expenditure.

6. Capture receipts, process bills and purchase orders, and route approvals automatically.

7. Reconcile payments, fees, refunds and expenses into Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite or Business Central.

8. If you operate a platform or marketplace, use the APIs for connected accounts, payouts, FX or issuing.

This is illustrative – not every business will use every step, and not every feature is included on every plan.

Getting started, pricing and availability

Opening an Airwallex Business Account starts with an online application that takes about 15 minutes to complete; processing is generally one to three business days once submitted.

Three plans are available in Australia:

• Explore – A$0 or A$29/month (waived if you deposit at least A$5,000/month or hold a A$10,000 balance); suited to small businesses managing global funds.

• Grow – A$99/month; adds expense management, Bill Pay, AI-powered automation and the Expense Policy Agent for growing businesses.

• Accelerate – from A$999/month; adds purchase orders, advanced integrations and dedicated support for larger, multi-entity businesses.

All prices are in AUD, inclusive of GST, and subject to plan terms and additional transaction or user fees. See the current pricing page for the full breakdown before committing to a plan.

Airwallex: Frequently asked questions

What is Airwallex?

Airwallex is a global financial platform that helps businesses manage international payments, multi-currency accounts, FX transfers, corporate cards, and expenses – all in one place.

What does Airwallex do?

Airwallex provides Global Accounts, FX transfers, Corporate Cards, Bill Pay, Payment Links, Expense Management, and Yield. Our platform helps businesses save on international transaction costs and speed up global payments.

How does Airwallex work?

Airwallex gives you access to our global financial infrastructure with local bank details in over 21 countries. You can send and receive money using local payment rails, trade at near-interbank rates, and manage everything from one platform

Is Airwallex a bank?

No, Airwallex is not a bank. Airwallex is an ASIC-licensed payment institution (AFSL No. 487221) that partners with local payment rails globally. We provide financial services that rival traditional banking, often with better rates and faster processing times.

Does the Airwallex payment platform accept Apple Pay?

Yes! We accept Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and popular card providers like Mastercard, Visa and Amex, plus over 160 payment methods in total. Your customers can pay however works best for them.

What countries does Airwallex operate in?

Airwallex provides local bank details in over 20 countries including the US, UK, Europe, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Canada. You can accept payments in 70+ countries and send transfers to 200+ countries worldwide.

Can I use Airwallex if I'm a small business or sole trader?

Absolutely. Airwallex serves businesses of all sizes, from sole traders to large enterprises. Our products scale with your business as you grow.

Do I need to close my existing bank account to use Airwallex?

No. Airwallex works alongside your existing bank accounts. Many businesses use Airwallex for international transactions while keeping their traditional bank account for domestic operations.

Can I withdraw money from Airwallex to my local bank account?

Yes. You can transfer funds from your Airwallex account to your local bank account whenever needed. You have full control over your funds.

Do I need to do business internationally to use Airwallex?

No. While Airwallex is designed for international business, even businesses planning to expand or those with occasional cross-border transactions can benefit from our platform.

Can all types of businesses use Airwallex?

Most businesses can use Airwallex, though we do have acceptance criteria to ensure we can provide the best service and comply with regulations. To see if your business qualifies, check our Acceptable Use Policy.

Disclaimer: This information doesn’t take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. If you are a customer of Airwallex Pty Ltd (AFSL No. 487221) read the Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) for the Direct Services available here.

The Airwallex Yield Liquidity Fund (Yield) is issued by K2 Asset Management Limited (K2) (ABN 95 085 445 094, AFSL No 244393), a wholly owned subsidiary of K2 Asset Management Holdings Limited. This information doesn’t take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Read the Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) and Financial Services Guide (FSG) for Yield, available at www.airwallex.com.au/terms from Airwallex Capital Pty Ltd (ABN 37 609 653 312, AFSL No. 549026). All investments carry risk. *Target returns are net of fees as at [insert date] (AEDT) and indicate past 1-day annualised returns of the relevant underlying JPMorgan Liquidity Funds.