Over the past decade, nearly every layer of the payments stack has been rethought for a global economy. Cross-border transfers, online card acceptance, and multi-currency wallets have all found modern challengers. But one of the largest payment surfaces has been largely untouched: in-person payments.
Point of sale solutions remain stubbornly local. When a business expands into a new market, they typically have to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance, and manage yet another set of vendor relationships because none of these systems were designed to let you manage multiple international entities from a single platform. This is largely true whether you're working with a legacy bank or an established fintech.
The reason is structural. Most payment companies — banks and fintechs alike — were built domestic-first. As they go global, they retrofit international capabilities onto architectures that were never designed for them. The fintechs that did disrupt POS solved the experience layer, not the infrastructure layer. They made it easier to take a payment and the hardware got a redesign. But the underlying acquiring networks, the rails, and the assumption that payments are fundamentally a domestic problem with international bolt-ons never changed.
POS is one of the last large payment surfaces that hasn't been rethought at the infrastructure level. In-person payments, at scale, across markets, are still largely owned by processors whose architectures predate the internet.
This month, we're expanding our payments acquiring suite to include In-Person (POS) Payments — built, like everything at Airwallex, for businesses operating at global scale.
What's Actually Broken
Most retailers have spent the last decade getting their online operations into shape — payments, customer data, and financial operations all talking to each other, processes automated, AI starting to handle work that used to require whole teams.
But in-store is a different story. Integrations with OMS and ERP systems take months. Reporting is disconnected. Loyalty programs break down between channels. Teams reconcile data manually across vendors. Payments data stays siloed, limiting visibility and making it harder to scale. What starts as a local POS deployment becomes a complex web that slows expansion and increases cost.
Every new market means a new terminal, a new vendor, a new set of reconciliation headaches. The experience a customer has online and the one they have in-store often feel like they belong to two different companies because operationally, they kind of do.
Global Is the New Normal
The share of commerce that crosses borders has been growing steadily for two decades and is accelerating. Multi-entity businesses, international DTC brands, and marketplaces with distributed seller bases need a platform that treats global as the default, not the exception.
The problem is that very few payment companies were built that way. And the difference between global by design and global by acquisition compounds over time in the same way that technical debt compounds. The more markets you enter through partnerships and integrations rather than direct infrastructure, the more fragile the whole system becomes.
What Airwallex POS Actually Does
Rather than treating in-store payments as an isolated hardware add-on or standalone service, Airwallex POS extends our global financial platform to the physical countertop. Online and in-store payments run on one platform, with integrated flows and consistent reporting across channels.
SDKs and APIs connect directly to OMS, ERP, and proprietary store systems. Local acquiring, regional payment methods, and compliance are handled across markets through a single integration. And because it's Airwallex, in-store transactions settle into multi-currency accounts with built-in FX, global payouts, issuing, and billing — the full financial stack, not just the terminal.
For enterprise retailers, this means deeper visibility and control across channels and markets, with the flexibility to integrate Airwallex POS into existing in-store payment infrastructure and simplify reconciliation by flowing transactions directly into OMS and ERP systems.
For SaaS platforms, it means the ability to embed turnkey, white-label in-store payments into their products — reducing engineering overhead while unlocking new monetization opportunities through transaction volume and embedded financial services.
Unifying the Stack
At the end of the day, our customers care about results. Because we own the stack, we are solving a fragmentation tax that global businesses have paid for decades. Unlike providers that focus on domestic spend or a single part of the payment lifecycle, Airwallex unifies the entire journey of money. POS is the piece that starts to complete the picture for businesses operating across both online and physical channels.
POS is possible because of the foundation we spent ten years building. It's how we unite the full suite of financial products a modern global business needs, online and in person.
Explore Airwallex POS to see how unified in-store and online payments can power your next stage of growth.
Jack Zhang
Co-founder and CEO of Airwallex
