Airwallex, an Australian fintech valued at $8 billion, is launching a point-of-sale (POS) product aimed at in-person payments across multiple countries through a single platform. The move deepens Airwallex’s rivalry with Stripe across the payments stack and positions the company directly against Square and Adyen in physical payments—one of the last major battlegrounds in financial technology.
What Airwallex is building: POS on a global infrastructure
Airwallex’s new POS product is designed to let businesses accept in-person payments in multiple countries via a single platform, without onboarding local vendors in every market. According to CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang, the key difference versus rivals is not just accepting payments, but handling settlement and operations in each market through a large footprint of licenses and direct connections to local networks.
Zhang describes the typical expansion workflow as one that forces businesses to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance, and manage additional vendor relationships when entering a new country. Airwallex’s approach aims to reduce that friction by centralizing the in-person and online payment experience.
The platform connects in-store and online payments and includes unified reporting. It also offers direct integrations into back-office systems. For multinational businesses, the result is that stores in different countries can operate on the same payment systems and reconcile in the same place, without managing separate local vendor relationships.
Infrastructure as a differentiator: licenses, networks, settlement, and currencies
Airwallex’s differentiation rests on the underlying infrastructure it has assembled over years. The company says it has close to 90 regulatory licenses across 70 to 80 regions, direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries, and the ability to settle transactions in more than 90 currencies.
Those capabilities matter because Airwallex’s argument is operational: for businesses, accepting payments is only one part of the payment lifecycle. Airwallex emphasizes settlement behavior and the ability to hold, convert, and deploy funds within a market rather than immediately repatriating them.
Zhang notes that Stripe and Square can process payments in a country but still require immediate payout to the merchant’s bank account. This capability gap, he argues, is tied to licenses—specifically citing Airwallex’s Japan license, which took seven years to obtain.
Airwallex’s positioning is that its licensing and settlement capabilities enable it to operate differently than rivals in the same markets. This is the logic behind extending its infrastructure from cross-border payment processing into in-person POS operations.
Competitive positioning: Stripe, Square, and Adyen
Airwallex’s move represents a deeper rivalry with Stripe across the payments stack. The company is also aiming directly at Square and Adyen, both significant players in physical payments infrastructure.
In the legacy payments market, Adyen makes a similar global infrastructure argument and is perhaps Airwallex’s most direct competitor in this space. Fiserv, and the combined Global Payments and Worldpay, command large market share among traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, though their architectures are described as older.
POS is where payments infrastructure meets day-to-day operational reality: terminals, merchant onboarding, and reconciliation workflows. By moving into in-person payments with a unified platform, Airwallex is asking businesses to evaluate not only checkout capabilities, but also the back-end settlement and reporting model.
In 2019, Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion when Airwallex had just $2 million in revenue. Zhang said he “even said yes to the deal,” but changed his mind after returning to Melbourne and investigating what motivated him to build Airwallex. The implication is that Airwallex has spent years building capabilities that, if they meet its claims, could reduce the need for local customization as businesses expand.
Funding and scale metrics
Airwallex is valued at $8 billion by its investors and claims it generates annualized revenue of about $1.3 billion. The company reports revenue is growing by roughly 85% every year.
On customer and transaction scale, Airwallex says it serves more than 46,000 U.S. businesses and processes $100 billion in annual volume. These metrics could indicate preparation for broader rollout of POS capabilities and international coverage.
What to watch next
The practical question is whether Airwallex can translate a licensing- and settlement-heavy infrastructure story into adoption for merchants that already have POS and payment relationships. The company’s differentiator is designed to show up during international expansion: unified systems, fewer local vendor relationships, and the ability to settle in ways that depend on local licenses.
As Airwallex pushes its POS product, industry observers may look for evidence that its reporting, integrations, and settlement approach reduce operational complexity for multinationals—especially in markets where it has specific licensing capabilities, such as the Japan license Zhang says took seven years to obtain.
Source: TechCrunch