Vendor payouts
This guide is for intake-to-pay, spend management, accounts payable, or bill pay platforms aiming to integrate global payouts into their existing products. It outlines the benefits of Airwallex's solutions and provides guidance on how to implement these without requiring in-depth expertise in the domain.
Through Airwallex Global Treasury solutions, platforms can automate and streamline the end-to-end vendor payout process and provide a seamless experience globally for their customers, natively within their product.
Overview
A typical intake-to-pay, spend management, accounts payable, or bill pay platform handles various tasks such as invoice approval workflows and vendor management. While some platforms may have introduced invoice payments in one or more currencies, global payments often require customers to manage transactions and reconciliation outside the platform, often through external bank interfaces. This comes with a number of challenges, such as manual error stemming from using disparate systems and the risks and uncertainties associated with international invoice payments and foreign exchange.
Our Global Treasury solution addresses these challenges by automating funding and cross-border payments, reducing FX conversion costs and eliminating hidden intermediary bank fees to ensure vendors always receive the correct invoiced amount. Our solution is especially beneficial when vendors invoice customers in the vendor's home currency, as it helps avoid hidden currency conversion fees and bank intermediary fees ensuring vendors receive the full invoiced amount without any deductions.
With broad geographical coverage, our Global Treasury solution enables platforms to swiftly enter new markets, expand services, and monetize payouts. The solution ensures global compliance with local regulations and guarantees reliable and timely invoice payments. It also provides low-cost, high-speed transactions through local payment rails and facilitates easy monetization with customizable mark-ups on FX conversions.
Integration models
Airwallex's vendor payouts solution supports two integration models:
In the model where platform's customers fund vendor payouts, customers are onboarded to Airwallex as connected accounts with Wallets in their own name to hold funds. For more information on connected accounts, see Connected accounts overview.
Choose your integration model
The choice of integration model will typically depend on the following factors:
- Platform offering: The services the platform is offering to its customers.
- Jurisdiction-specific legal nuances: Different jurisdictions have different regulations regarding fund ownership, impacting whether the platform can be in the flow of funds.
Our team will work with you to further analyze both factors and identify the suitable integration model. Note that platforms can potentially choose one or more integration models.
| Vendor payouts funded by the platform | Vendor payouts funded by the platform's customers | |
|---|---|---|
| Suited for | Platforms fronting vendor payouts and invoicing their customers for repayments (e.g., at month end); platforms holding licenses in the jurisdictions they want to launch | Platforms that are out of the funds flow, with vendor payouts funded directly by platform's customers |
| Customer onboarding to Airwallex | Optional | Required (customers are onboarded to Airwallex with dedicated connected accounts) |
| Account where funds are collected | Platform's Wallet (without connected account) | Customer's connected account Wallet |
| Is the platform in funds flow? | Yes | No |
| Payouts initiated from | Platform's Wallet | Customer's connected account Wallet |
Airwallex can help you fast track your implementation by providing the necessary infrastructure and tooling support for secure money movement. For more information, see Enabling infrastructure and tooling.