Framefox sees the big picture of global cash flow and team spending with Airwallex

Framefox is a design-led online framing and printing business that makes it easier for people to get their photos and artwork on the wall. 

After returning to New Zealand from London, founder George Coltart saw how slow traditional framing was. From walking into a shop, to weeks-long waits, to not really knowing what you’d end up with. With Framefox he turned the process on its head, combining customisation, clear UX, and local manufacturing. 

Framefox had already modernised fulfilment, manufacturing, customer support, and marketing with a strong digital stack. Finance was the outlier, with global payments spread across traditional banks, manual reconciliations, and a single shared company card. Then Airwallex entered the picture.

The art of fixing fragmented finance

Framefox operates in New Zealand and Australia, but works with suppliers in other countries and pays many of them in USD. 

Under a traditional model, this meant opening and managing separate banking relationships in each market, logging into different portals for different currencies, dealing with different fee structures and transfer processes, and having limited ability to hold foreign currency balances. Every payment exposed the business to FX swings.

For a relatively lean team, managing multiple banks and inconsistent cross-border rails created significant overhead, and felt out of step with the rest of their tech stack.

George Coltart

Founder, Framefox

Traditional banking wasn't really set up for our model.

By moving to Airwallex Global Accounts, Framefox consolidated how it moves money around the world. Local accounts in NZD, AUD and USD let the team receive and hold funds in the currencies they actually use, and low-cost transfers are straightforward and transparent. 

A USD balance means they can pay international suppliers who only accept US dollars, while reducing exposure to exchange-rate volatility by converting when it suits them, not at the moment of each invoice.

Smoothing out the operational rough edges

Before Airwallex, cross-border finance was a tangle of tools for Framefox. International transfers were initiated through traditional banks, often with unclear pricing and one-off fees for each payment. 

Card transactions and bank activity had to be exported as CSVs and reconciled manually, with leadership spending hours each month tying transactions back to the right part of the business.

As the business grew, this manual work didn’t scale. Every new supplier, market or subscription added more complexity to already brittle workflows.

With Airwallex in place, those workflows have been streamlined. Accounts and card spend now sit inside a single platform, with a clear, searchable transaction history. The team no longer relies on multiple portals and CSV exports just to understand where money went, and cross-border transfers can be initiated with transparent rates and fees, instead of guessing at the final cost.

For George, the impact shows up every month: money saved on international transfers that no longer carry per-payment fees, and hours saved from downloading, merging and manually reconciling data from multiple sources.

Reframing team spending

On the card side, Framefox’s early setup was typical of many growing businesses. There was one main company card that everything went on – from digital advertising to SaaS tools to office purchases. 

“Before we started using Airwallex cards, we'd just have one card for the entire business and reconciliation was a pain,” says George. 

Marketing spend for Meta, Google and other platforms was mixed in with unrelated costs, and reconciling that single card feed meant working out which charge belonged to which campaign, team or cost centre, often long after the fact. Campaigns also risked being interrupted if the shared card hit its limit because of other teams’ spend.

With Airwallex Corporate Cards, Framefox now runs marketing spend in a way that actually reflects how modern campaigns work. Tom and the team use dedicated virtual cards for digital ad spend, with the option to allocate cards per ad account or project. 

Tom McKenzie

Digital Marketing Manager, Framefox

I no longer have to chase the boss for his card. It means that I don't have to spend any of my own money on business expenses anymore. I simply put them through the Airwallex account and job's done.

Budgets can be assigned and monitored per card, so the team always knows how much headroom remains for a given channel or campaign. All digital advertising and many SaaS subscriptions now flow through clearly-labelled Airwallex cards, making it easy to track and report.

Because those cards are funded from the appropriate currencies (including USD where relevant), Framefox also avoids extra FX and international card fees on recurring SaaS and ad charges.

A picture perfect financial stack for a multi-market business

By moving to Airwallex, Framefox has modernised the financial infrastructure behind its online-first, multi-market business.

For a company that has already invested heavily in streamlining fulfillment, UX and operations, Airwallex is the finance layer that finally matches that ambition, giving Framefox a clearer, simpler way to move money as it continues to grow across markets.

Disclaimer: The information contained herein is factual information only and is not intended to imply any recommendation or opinion about a financial product.