Earlier this year, I had shared our broader plans for 2023 as we continue to scale and reach new heights. As a company, improving the status quo remains core to our identity, and one of the key priorities I shared was our focus on enhancing our infrastructure and platform.

With that in mind, I want to update you on our progress in connecting you — the entrepreneurs, business builders, makers and creators — with economic opportunities in every corner of the world. We have made significant progress in recent months as we look to constantly improve our capabilities that benefit businesses of all sizes, everywhere.

From increasing our global coverage across all services, to continuously improving the speed, security and reliability of our infrastructure while launching new products and features - we remain steadfast on delivering our mission and building the best solutions for our customers.

Infrastructure Coverage

Last year, we processed close to US$50 billion in annualized transactions volume, and doubled our number of monthly transacting customers across all the markets where we operate. This year we will achieve even more as we continue to accelerate our investments in the core of our business to build the world’s most powerful global financial infrastructure and expand our reach into markets where we see significant opportunities to support your business growth.

• Borderless money movements
• In Q1-23, customer collections increased 62% vs. Q1-22, with payouts up 64% in the same period.
• We are now available in 12 currencies across 62 countries (with Indonesia now live, Denmark and Poland due in the coming weeks) and our Local Payouts coverage has increased to 93 countries (now including Israel and the UAE).
• Accepting global payments like a local
• In Q1-23, our volume of payments processed was up 250% vs. Q1-22.
• Our ability to accept payments globally continues to scale covering 34 countries with Card Schemes, adding American Express in AU, HK, SG and UK, Union Pay in the UK and SG, JCB in HK and SG.
• We have expanded our market leading coverage of Local Payment Methods to 9 countries across APAC and EMEA (while accepting a total of 59 LPMs throughout 23 countries).
• The world’s modern issuing platform
• In Q1-23, our total processed card volume increased 216% vs. Q1-22, with transactions up 252% vs. Q1-22.
• We can now provide cards to business customers in a total of 36 countries (following our Israel launch this quarter), with Virtual, Digital and Physical support now available in almost all of our markets.

Looking ahead for the rest of 2023, we will continue to expand our geographical footprint to ensure we remain the world’s best global financial infrastructure. This includes better support for our customers across Canada, Brazil, Mexico and the Middle East, further increasing our coverage of global treasury management services to 22 new countries and 16 currencies, and enabling cross-border employee card issuing across 50+ countries, among many other improvements we plan to make.

Speed, Security and Reliability

Ensuring we can process your transactions faster, safer and reliably remains core to our customer promise. Today’s modern businesses want (and need) a smooth online payment experience. If it isn’t, we recognize it directly impacts a business’ bottom line.

• Our payout success rate remains at 99%, while our straight-through processing for payouts continues to increase leading to an improved average payout time of 4.2 hours globally, and ~64% of payouts complete within 5 mins.
• We continue to improve our payment success rate through data-science led optimization, while ensuring our risk management performance remains front and center towards reducing chargeback and fraud ratios.
• We began the process of rolling out our own in-house issuing processor to selected Australian customers this quarter, with coverage expanding due to strong performance. This represents a significant milestone in our progress to becoming a full stack issuer and ensuring seamless & world class experience.
• Finally, we have augmented our back office operations to 13 locations around the world, allowing us to provide better, more efficient, and global 24/7 operational support to all customers.

Ensuring we continue to optimize the payment experience will more than ever, be a priority for us in the year ahead.

Business Account: A Global Financial Operating System (Global FinOS) for modern businesses

With our Business Account, we are building a comprehensive set of solutions to power and streamline payments and financial operations for global businesses of all sizes. To support the global ambitions of today’s modern businesses, we have also been expanding our functionalities, to provide more enterprise grade features for a seamless and efficient experience no matter the size of the organization:

• In Treasury Management, we launched the functionality to create and manage multiple accounts under the same legal entity or cross entities under the same ownership, as well as enabling self-service global account management. In addition, recently we rolled out customizable, multi-layer approvals for transfers, enabling stronger enterprise grade security for our customers globally.
• For Spend Management, we now have multi-layer approvals in place, allowing for configurable workflows based on specific amounts and approvers. We also launched our automated expense categorization for faster, more efficient categorization and analysis of expenses for our customers.
• We provided a significant upgrade in our overall admin experience across all processes within both Expense Management and our wider Cards offering (e.g. faster employee card creation, improved search capabilities, review notifications, bulk approvals), while continuing to invest in the overall performance of our issuing platform.
• We launched Xero Invoice payments for our customers in the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as launching the Beta for Airwallex Pay to selected customers across HK and Singapore. Increased coverage and platform performance will remain the biggest focus for this year for our Payments offering to ensure we provide the safest and most reliable channel for you to do business with your customers.

We will continue to roll out significant features and functionalities across our Global FinOS products and services, including new ERP integrations, spend reporting and analytics, cross-border employee cards and OCR capabilities to name a few - watch this space!

Airwallex for Platforms: the Leading Global Embedded Payments and Financial Infrastructure

For platforms, our focus remains on developing the leading embedded payments and finance offering to help you to build global payments and financial products for your customers, from programmatically integrating end-to-end payments throughout your platform or creating bank accounts and issuing multi-currency cards for your customers.

• Within Payments for Platforms, our PSP-agnostic ('acquirer of choice') solution continues to gain traction as we scale availability, allowing marketplaces to leverage their existing acquirers and disperse funds by leveraging Airwallex’s licensing, global payout and account infrastructure.
• For Global Treasury, we released embedded payout components allowing greater speed to market for our Platform customers, with integration of payout capability now possible in under 2 weeks. We also released API enhancements through an country specific schema to increase payout success rates, while launching instant verification through Plaid for linked accounts, improving risk control & contributing to product market fit.
• In Banking as a Service, we launched the first major client integration of white labeled digital consumer cards onto Apple Pay and Google Pay to over 1 million potential customers.
• Finally, we are accelerating investment into Operations tooling to improve the end to end experience for all core customers, initially through a new Platform API reports suite. We also unlocked further coverage for our embedded finance Platform, with cross-border Onboarding now possible for 6 new jurisdictions, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Thailand and Israel, where we most recently launched.

Looking ahead, we've set ourselves an ambitious roadmap for 2023: increasing our reach into new markets including Canada, Brazil, Mexico and the Middle East, improving the speed, reliability and safety of our infrastructure while launching yet new products and features across both Global FinOS and Embedded Finance. But more importantly, we remain committed to our mission and purpose to empower modern businesses to grow without borders.

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