What a decade of Airwallex tells us about the next decade of growth

Australia is and always has been a nation of builders. It’s part of our heritage. Building greatness from the ground up. 

Every day entrepreneurs across the country are creating new products, finding new customers and taking Australian ideas to the world. But too many businesses are still held back by financial infrastructure that wasn't designed for the way businesses operate today.

My co-founders and I experienced this ourselves more than a decade ago in Melbourne.

We were trying to source goods internationally for our own business, and honestly, it was a little overwhelming, as it is for so many founders trying to operate across borders. Moving money was slow, expensive and unnecessarily complicated. We believed there had to be a better way.

That belief became Airwallex.

Airwallex began in Australia ten years ago and remains our longest-established market. A decade in, we wanted to understand whether solving these problems at scale was making a measurable difference to the businesses we serve and the Australian economy more broadly.

Technology companies often talk about building for an internet economy where businesses can grow without borders. But borders still matter. Expanding into a new country means navigating different currencies, payment systems, regulations and financial infrastructure. Airwallex gives businesses of all sizes a global business account that handles much of that complexity, making it dramatically easier to operate beyond the country where they were founded.

Over the past decade, Airwallex has evolved into an agentic global business account, bringing together payments, billing, cards, spend management and treasury across dozens of currencies and markets. Increasingly, AI-native capabilities are helping businesses automate financial work and make better decisions. The promise of Airwallex remains the same: make it easier for businesses of any size to compete globally so they can grow locally, creating jobs, investment and economic activity in the communities they call home.

To understand whether that was actually happening, we commissioned Mandala Partners, an independent economics research and advisory firm whose research is regularly drawn on by policymakers and media, to assess Airwallex's economic impact in Australia.

The results begin to show what that promise looks like in practice.

$4.6 billion in economic benefits

Mandala estimates that Airwallex supported $4.6 billion in economic benefits to Australia in 2025. To put that in perspective, that is equivalent in scale to around 2% of the annual contribution Australia’s technology sector makes to GDP.

Around $2.5 billion of those benefits flow directly to businesses using Airwallex, through greater productivity, lower costs and access to new markets. A further $2 billion flows into the broader economy as those businesses grow, buy from suppliers, invest and create economic activity throughout their communities.

At an economy-wide level, Mandala estimates that the incremental economic benefits Airwallex provides to its customers are equivalent to supporting around 29,000 full-time jobs across Australia, with around 16,000 associated with Airwallex customers’ own economic activity and a further 13,000 through their supply chains.

Importantly, those benefits aren't confined to our major cities. More than $1.1 billion, or around one in every four dollars of economic benefit, flows to regional, rural and remote Australia.

For me, though, one of the most important findings is what this means at the level of an individual business.

Giving businesses back their most valuable resources

Australia has a productivity challenge, and for small and medium-sized businesses, some of the biggest constraints are easy to miss. They show up in hours lost to administration, money lost to bank fees and foreign exchange costs, and growth opportunities deferred because expanding into a new market feels too complex or expensive.

Mandala’s research puts a number on those hidden costs: 

• A typical SMB using Airwallex captures around $200,000 a year in economic benefits compared with businesses not using the platform, driven by lower financial costs, greater productivity and better access to international markets.

• On average, Australian SMBs using Airwallex save $13,400 a year through lower foreign exchange costs, reduced bank fees and administrative efficiencies. 

• They also reclaim 12.4 hours every week previously spent on financial administration, time worth roughly $17,000 a year.

For a small business, that is effectively a day and a half every week returned to the company. It is time that can be spent finding customers, developing products, hiring people or planning the next stage of growth. 

But the larger cost is often the opportunity not pursued. For many SMBs, going global still means opening new accounts, managing multiple currencies, navigating unfamiliar payment systems and absorbing additional fees and complexity. That can make staying domestic feel like the easier choice, even when demand exists elsewhere.

Australia will not solve its productivity challenge by asking small businesses to work harder. It will solve it by removing the friction that consumes their time, capital and ambition. Better financial infrastructure can help businesses operate more efficiently at home and make expanding abroad feel less like a leap and more like a natural next step.

Australian businesses should be global businesses

The other finding I'm particularly interested in is what we're seeing when Australian businesses look beyond our borders:

• Australian SMBs using Airwallex are 1.5x more likely to expand overseas than Australian SMBs overall.

• The average Australian SMB Airwallex customer now trades across around 4.5 overseas markets, up from around three in 2021. This shows Australian SMBs are not just selling overseas, they're increasingly expanding their reach across multiple global markets.

For decades, operating globally was disproportionately difficult for smaller businesses. Large multinationals could build banking relationships, treasury teams and financial infrastructure across multiple markets. An Australian startup or SMB rarely had access to the same resources.

The internet gave businesses everywhere access to global customers. Financial infrastructure needs to enable that ambition, not stand in its way.

We believe every business should have access to the same global financial infrastructure once reserved for the world's largest enterprises. We're focused on lowering the barriers to selling, trading, hiring and expanding internationally, wherever a business is trying to grow.

What Australia tells us about the future

Australia is our longest-established market, and after a decade it is incredibly fulfilling to see Airwallex's impact quantified in billions of dollars of economic benefits and tens of thousands of jobs supported.

But Australia represents only a fraction of the opportunity ahead. One way to put the scale of that impact in context is to consider what an equivalent contribution would look like in larger economies. Airwallex's $4.6 billion annual economic benefit in Australia is equivalent to around 2% of Australia's technology sector GDP. An impact of the same relative scale would equate to as much as US$60 billion in the United States and €40 billion across Europe each year.

These figures are not forecasts of Airwallex's future economic impact in those markets. But they provide a sense of scale for what the impact we've already demonstrated in Australia means when viewed through the lens of much larger economies.

That's what excites me most about the next decade of Airwallex. The opportunity isn't simply to build a bigger company. It's to scale the impact we've demonstrated in Australia by building the agentic global business account that helps businesses everywhere operate more efficiently, compete globally and grow locally.

Read the full Mandala Partners report: Airwallex's Economic Impact in Australia

All monetary figures are in Australian dollars unless otherwise stated.