Circles unlocks financial services for telcos globally with Airwallex

Introducing Circles

Circles is a global B2B SaaS platform for telecom operators. It provides the software layer that sits above the legacy telco infrastructure, giving operators the speed and flexibility their core systems weren’t built to deliver.

The Circles platform helps operators across 14 countries, including KDDI, e&, AT&T, and Telkomsel, launch new products and digital brands at speed. Circles also owns Circles.Life, a leading Singapore-based digital mobile operator known for pushing the boundaries on product innovation.

As Circles expanded its SaaS offering, the company saw an opportunity to help telco operators unlock new revenue streams by embedding wallets, cards, and payments directly into their platforms. 

But bringing financial services to market proved harder than anticipated. Circles needed a way to launch embedded finance at scale without being bogged down by operational drag.  

The challenge

Fragmented finance systems slowing innovation and expansion

For SaaS providers like Circles, embedding financial services means taking on banking-grade responsibilities: KYC and AML checks, card scheme rules, transaction monitoring, licensing, and day-to-day operations like money movement, ledgering, reconciliation, and FX pricing. Building this infrastructure in-house – and repeating it for every market – would pull the team away from product innovation and erode margins.

Most providers don’t offer wallets, cards, payments, and FX on a single stack. To support all three, Circles would have had to work with multiple vendors – each with separate onboarding, compliance reviews, and operational overhead.

For a multi-market platform, that fragmentation would mean higher build effort, slower iteration, and financial products that are hard to scale across operators and countries.

Gaurav Tandon

VP, Product Management and Product Design at Circles

“The goal wasn't to launch a single wallet or a single card. We wanted something repeatable, something telcos could deploy across markets and use cases, without rebuilding from scratch every time.”

Fragmentation also limits what platforms can do with their financial data. When accounts, FX, cards, and payments sit in separate systems, there is no single source of truth. Automation and real-time insights depend on connected data – something that’s difficult to achieve when every component runs on a different provider.

Circles needed a partner that could provide a full embedded finance stack on one global infrastructure, so the team could focus on building products for telcos instead of managing vendors and operations.

The solution

Unified financial infrastructure that scales across markets

With Airwallex's Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution, Circles built FinX, an embedded finance layer it can deploy across telcos, markets, and use cases from a single integration.

Instead of building financial infrastructure from scratch, Circles plugs into Airwallex’s existing infrastructure, licences, and banking relationships via API. This removes the need to establish a banking presence or manage compliance market by market, freeing the team to focus on launching products at global scale.

To validate FinX, Circles rolled it out with Circles.Life, starting with a multi-currency wallet embedded directly in the telco’s mobile app. Circles.Life’s customers can open accounts in-app via SingPass and get dedicated account numbers instantly. 

After launching the wallet, Circles introduced the Zerofy Cashback Card, a Visa-backed debit card that customers can activate instantly in the Circles.Life app using Airwallex’s Issuing APIs. Because everything runs on Airwallex’s unified infrastructure, adding cards to the existing wallet didn’t require a new round of onboarding, compliance review, or vendor integration. The groundwork was already in place, so Circles could focus on the end-to-end product experience – from cashback logic and FX economics to the in-app journey.

With wallet balances, card transactions, and FX all flowing through a single platform, Circles gains a real-time view of its financial operations across markets. Finance leaders get a clear picture of money in, money out, and currency exposure. Product teams can launch new features faster, without adding more vendors or complexity.

This unified infrastructure also creates a connected data layer. Every pay-in, payout, and card transaction flows through one system, forming a single source of truth across markets. With the full finance stack integrated, Circles can start to apply AI across wallet balances, spend patterns, and funding flows. This lays the foundation for more automated, data-driven financial operations as FinX scales.

Gaurav Tandon

VP, Product Management and Product Design at Circles

“Airwallex gives us a single embedded finance stack with global reach and licensing. It's flexible and modular, so there’s no heavy lifting involved for operators when launching a financial product."

The result

 With Airwallex’s BaaS infrastructure underpinning FinX, Circles proved that a SaaS platform can deploy and monetise embedded financial services at scale without building or operating the infrastructure itself.

The results from Circles.Life also demonstrate what embedded finance can deliver for telco operators when wallets, cards, and payments run on a single, connected infrastructure.

• 40% of new subscriber growth driven by the multi-currency wallet, unlocking users who prefer not to store cards on file.

• 5x growth in monthly transactions per user, driven by the cashback offer and smooth in-app onboarding.

• 10x increase in monthly spend per cardholder, as customers shift more everyday spending into the Circles.Life ecosystem.

• 30-point year-on-year increase in NPS among card users, signalling stronger retention and satisfaction.

Circles can now launch new financial products without onboarding additional vendors. It can enter new markets without rebuilding compliance from scratch. And it can move faster while keeping full control over the customer experience.

Looking ahead, telco operators using FinX can tap into this data foundation to automate more of their financial operations – from reconciliation to customer insights and cashback optimisation.

Circles is now extending FinX into new markets across Asia, with plans to introduce interest-earning balances and remittances for Circles.Life customers. With Airwallex’s BaaS infrastructure at its core, Circles has a repeatable embedded finance layer it can scale globally, while Airwallex handles the complexity underneath.

This publication does not constitute legal, tax, or professional advice from Airwallex, nor does it substitute seeking such advice, and makes no express or implied representations / warranties / guarantees regarding content accuracy, completeness, or currency. If you would like to request an update, feel free to contact us at [[email protected]]. Airwallex (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. (201626561Z) is licensed as a Major Payment Institution and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.