How Airwallex speeds up your cash flow

Key takeaways

• Cross-border eCommerce businesses lose between 1.5% and 5% of every international transaction to FX fees, and forced conversions can double that cost.

• When payments, multi-currency accounts, FX, and spend management sit on one platform, the gap between earning revenue and having usable cash starts to close.

• Minor Hotels, McLaren Racing, and Conductr each replaced a patchwork of banks, brokers, and manual processes with Airwallex and saw immediate results in cash flow speed, cost savings, and visibility.

The gap between earning money and having it to spend just seems to keep growing. Traditional banks and many payment processors charge between 1.5% and 5% on foreign exchange for every international transaction. For an eCommerce business doing US$500,000 a month across three currencies, that's anywhere from US$7,500 to US$37,500 quietly leaving the business before you've paid a single supplier.

And FX is just one piece of the puzzle. Your revenue might sit in an Amazon holding account for 14 days while tomorrow's Facebook ad bill debits in a different currency. Your Shopify payouts settle in GBP but your manufacturer in Vietnam needs USD, and your bank converts both ways at a rate you didn't agree to. You've got three marketplace dashboards open, two bank portals, and a spreadsheet that was accurate last Tuesday.

The good news is that this gap between earning and having doesn't need to keep widening as you scale, and it can be closed completely. When your payments, multi-currency accounts, FX, and spend management all live on one platform, you get real-time visibility over where your cash sits, keep more of it by avoiding unnecessary conversions and fees, and can plan ahead using data you trust. Here's how that works with Airwallex.

Get paid faster with localised checkouts

Over 90% of global shoppers want to pay in their local currency using a payment method they recognise, and when they can't, conversion rates drop and cart abandonment climbs. That's revenue your forecast expected but your bank account never sees.

With Airwallex, you can accept payments in 130+ currencies via 160+ local payment methods, from credit cards and digital wallets to buy now, pay later (BNPL) options like Klarna and Afterpay. Our payment optimisation engine, Optimize 360, works in the background to improve success rates and reduce false declines, so fewer valid transactions get rejected at the point of sale.

Where this really connects to cash flow is through like-for-like settlement. Funds land in your multi-currency wallet in the same currency your customer paid in, without forced conversion or settlement fees eating into your margins. You hold those funds in the original currency until you decide what to do with them, whether that's paying a supplier in the same region or converting at a rate and time that works for you.

Minor Hotels, a global hospitality group, is on course to save over US$7.2 million a year by combining like-for-like settlement with local acquiring through Airwallex. Payment success rates are set to rise by close to 30%, recovering millions in bookings that would otherwise have been lost to failed transactions. More successful payments at checkout means faster, more predictable cash coming in.

Hold, convert, and pay in the currencies you need

When Conductr, a European creative production company, started growing its international client base, the cracks in its banking setup showed fast. The company's bank was forcing all USD receipts into GBP, regardless of what Conductr needed the money for. And since most of its suppliers and contractors billed in USD, the team had to convert that GBP straight back again. Two conversion fees on the same money, every time. "Moving money around the world was a nightmare," says Jos, Conductr's co-founder. "We were being hit twice on transaction fees and paying terrible rates."

It's a pattern that plays out across eCommerce businesses selling and sourcing internationally. A platform settles your EUR sales into your home currency at its own rate, and then you convert again to pay a European supplier. The pay-in and payout currencies matched in the first place, but the infrastructure forced two conversions where none were needed.

Airwallex Global Accounts let you sidestep this entirely. You can open local currency accounts in 20+ currencies across 70+ countries without setting up local entities, hold funds in the currencies you collect them in, and pay suppliers from those same balances. When the currencies match, you skip the conversion. When you do need to convert, you do it at near-interbank rates on your own schedule, and you can lock in forward rates ahead of time so the FX assumptions in your cash flow forecast are fixed rather than floating with the market.

The Conductr team now holds and pays in the currencies it needs and uses Airwallex's FX rate alerts to time conversions when the rate works for them. The double hit on margins is gone, and they have much more control over when and how their cash moves. In their first year as an Airwallex customer, they saved over £100,000 on conversion and transfer fees.

See and control your spend before cash leaves the account

Cash outflows become much easier to forecast when you can see them before they hit the bank account. With Airwallex, purchase orders, supplier payments, employee expenses, and corporate cards all feed into one platform. When you approve a purchase order, it shows up as a committed outflow straight away, so your forecast reflects what's been authorised, not what's already left. Employee card transactions, reimbursement claims, and recurring bills all flow into the same view, giving you a complete picture of spend across every category and currency.

McLaren Racing competes in F1 races across 24 cities each season. They saw the difference immediately after consolidating payments with Airwallex. Previously, the finance team slowly processed 30 individual international payments one at a time. Now they push payments through a custom approval workflow and execute batch payouts using a template, with each run taking under an hour. Over the course of a month, that saves the finance team half a day of work. Transfer times dropped from two to five business days down to 90% arriving within hours, with 65% arriving instantly, which means suppliers get paid faster and cash flow becomes more predictable for everyone involved.

See your full cash position in real time

When you can see every balance, payment, and transaction across markets from a single dashboard, the time spent on reconciliation drops and the quality of your forecast goes up. Airwallex integrates with Xero, NetSuite, and other accounting tools to sync transactions as they happen, which means your month-end process no longer depends on pulling CSV exports from multiple bank portals and matching them by hand.

For businesses managing multiple entities across regions, this is even more relevant. Our global entity management gives you one consolidated view of balances, payments, and reports across your entire operation, so allocating cash between entities and planning across markets becomes something you can do on a Tuesday morning rather than a week-long exercise at the end of the quarter.

The compounding benefit is that every section of this blog feeds into this one. When your checkout conversions are higher, your settlement is same-day in the original currency, your FX conversions happen on your terms, and your spend is visible before cash leaves, the data flowing into your forecast is cleaner, faster, and more complete. Your finance team stops reconstructing what happened last month and starts planning what happens next.

One platform, faster cash flow

Cash flow speed comes down to removing friction at every stage of the cycle, from how you accept payments and settle funds, to when you convert currencies, how you manage spend, and how quickly all of that data reaches your forecast. When these pieces sit on separate systems, each one adds delay, cost, and manual work. When they come together on one platform, cash moves faster and your visibility over it improves at every step.

That's what Minor Hotels, McLaren Racing, and Conductr have in common. Different industries, different markets, different scale, but all three replaced a patchwork of banks, brokers, and manual processes with one platform and saw the results in their cash flow.