Bird selects Airwallex to power its global financial infrastructure
Learn how Bird uses Airwallex’s financial infrastructure to simplify payments for over 29,000 customers, replacing more than 20 banks it relied on previously.
20
banks replaced by Airwallex infrastructure
29,000+
customers served by Bird worldwide
54 million+
API requests handled per day by Airwallex (from all customers)
Bird’s mission is to create a world where communicating with a business is as easy as talking to a friend. Headquartered in Amsterdam, Bird processes over 5 trillion+ messages, calls, and emails for over 29,000 customers including Google, Facebook, and Uber.
Location
Global
Company size
800+ employees
Industry
Software and Tech
Introducing Bird
Bird (formerly MessageBird) powers the communication between businesses and their customers – across any channel, always with the right context, and on every corner of the planet. If you’ve ever ordered takeout, returned a package, contacted customer service, or requested a login code, you’ve probably interacted with Bird technology.
Bird is used by leading technology companies across many sectors – including Google, Facebook, and Uber – to process over 5 trillion+ messages, calls, and emails for 29,000 customers worldwide.
The challenge
Today, the platform transacts hundreds of millions of USD annually and is growing fast, creating a scaling challenge for its finance team.
Bird’s financial infrastructure was fragmented across 10+ entities and currencies, and supported by different regional banking partners. This fragmentation created process inefficiencies and unnecessarily costly fund flows. Moreover, central to the efficiency of Bird operations was a sophisticated integration with its ERP system, NetSuite, which its global banking partners could not accommodate or adequately support.
It also left the Finance team with a heavy manual workload and obscured a true picture of the company’s global financial position.
“As we scaled the product and expanded to new territories, we quickly found our financial operations were becoming fragmented, inefficient, and limiting our ability to move quickly. The finance team was also having to manage an ever-growing AP and AR function with significant manual overhead.
“We needed to find a global payments partner that could offer all the services and coverage of our existing banking infrastructure combined. They’d need to have great APIs and strong technical capabilities. Airwallex was the perfect match,” says Robert Vis, Founder and CEO at Bird.
The solution
Bird uses Airwallex to consolidate its financial infrastructure into a single provider, providing end-to-end visibility of multi-entity accounts and its virtual card infrastructure. Bird also leverages Airwallex’s extensive global coverage to make single and batch payouts to suppliers worldwide and manage payroll, which it can reconcile more easily thanks to the purpose-built integration between Airwallex and NetSuite.
How it works
Accounts infrastructure
Using the Airwallex Global Treasury and Payments Network (GTPN), Bird can instantly spin up local accounts in multiple currencies in each of its operating markets. From one dashboard, the finance team can access a real-time group view of all accounts and manage intra-account money movement at optimal spot rates.
Payouts and FX
As part of its product, Bird pays hundreds of suppliers on a regular basis. It uses Airwallex’s multi-level Approvals feature to better control spend in a time-efficient manner. The finance team can also instantly issue virtual and physical cards to create easily reconcilable supplier payments.
NetSuite integration
While integration to NetSuite (and more) is available as standard for Airwallex customers, Airwallex and Bird worked together on a more sophisticated integration that'd provide greater speed and depth of reconciliation with NetSuite.
Card issuing
Bird is using Airwallex’s virtual card issuing product to pay its global suppliers and marketing spend with greater control and tracking.
Payroll
Bird utilizes Airwallex’s batch transfers functionality to manage its own payroll across entities, eliminating the need for an additional provider and simplifying the finance team's workload.
The results
Speed, agility, and enhanced partner support
As an API-first platform experiencing strong global growth, Airwallex collaborated with Bird’s tech teams on key projects to further optimize performance. Likewise, and unlike their previous traditional banking partner, Bird has a dedicated Account Management team at Airwallex, which advocates for the long-term strategic partnership.
Finance team efficiency, control, and visibility
Critically, Bird has futureproofed its finance team with a more efficient and automated way to match AP and AR, saving countless hours and headaches. Approvals, group account views, and control functions have also given the Finance team end-to-end visibility of the company’s finances and greater confidence in who's spending what and when.
Robert Vis
Founder and CEO at Bird
“Airwallex is a fantastic partner for us and we’re excited to see how this partnership develops. They understand the needs of a global SaaS platform and have gone out of their way to work with us to improve how we use their services. They’re not just a great alternative to traditional banking infrastructure, but a level up. Empowered by Airwallex, our Finance team can focus on what they do best, which is optimising operations and growing the business efficiently.”
Trusted by 150,000+ businesses
“Airwallex saves us $40,000 annually in collections costs from our sales on Amazon, which is the majority of our sales in the US market. It also allows us to ‘repurpose’ our international currencies. For example, if we sell in Europe we can pay European suppliers in euros as well.”
"Airwallex is an innovative fintech platform with a first-class customer support team. They transformed the previously painful process of creating corporate cards into something simple."
“Having all our global SaaS subscriptions in one place has streamlined our finance processes and enabled better tracking and control of expenses. It’s even better knowing that Airwallex isn’t hitting us with any international transaction fees.”
“We were looking for a technology-enabled banking partner who could help us manage our finances across markets. We use Airwallex for opening accounts in new markets quickly.”
Charlie Bullock
CEO and Co-Founder, Scan.com
“Airwallex has allowed us to get things done at ten times the speed it used to happen. It means we could spend more time on our brand, our website and the customer experience. That’s what helped us to grow so much in a short span of time.”
"Airwallex is the perfect cross-border payments and FX partner to support our mission. Their strong technological infrastructure and dedicated engineering support team has allowed for a seamless integration process."
“It is crazy to see that kind of technology...it's just one of those ideas where you think, why has this not been done before?”
“Airwallex has unlocked a much more efficient way of managing our money that we couldn’t do before. Our previous provider could not scale the way we needed it to. Now, our team is freed up to tackle the more important work on how ClipChamp expands globally.”
“Airwallex provides us with flexibility and cost savings in dealing internationally. We used Airwallex to receive our recent global fundraising round and pay international suppliers and are saving at least 5% per dollar transferred versus the big banks.”
“These small percentages here and there add up over time with a real bottom line impact. When I see the rates are good, I’ll convert my AUD into USD, knowing that I’ve saved money that I can re-invest into the business in the long-run.”
