Jack Zhang's decision to reject Stripe's $1.2 billion acquisition offer in 2018 is looking increasingly prescient. At the time, Airwallex had only $2 million in annualized revenue, making the deal's 600-times revenue multiple seem almost irresistible. Yet Zhang walked away. Today, the Melbourne-based financial infrastructure company claims more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, processes nearly $300 billion in annualized transaction volume, and is growing at 85 percent year-over-year .

What Made Zhang Reject One of Silicon Valley's Most Lucrative Offers?

Zhang's decision came down to unfinished ambition. When he looked at the whiteboard in his office, the original vision remained incomplete: to build the financial infrastructure that lets any business operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company. Two of his three co-founders voted against the deal, which reinforced his instinct to keep building rather than sell .

The founder's conviction runs deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at age 15 without his parents, barely speaking English. When his family's finances collapsed, he took on four jobs to fund a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, including bartending, washing dishes, graveyard shifts at a gas station, and picking lemons on a farm during school holidays. He later spent years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank before launching roughly 10 businesses, ranging from a magazine at age 14 to a burger chain .

How Did Airwallex Build a Moat That Stripe Struggles to Match?

The key to Airwallex's competitive advantage lies in what Zhang calls the "path of maximum resistance." Rather than building on top of existing payment infrastructure, Airwallex painstakingly assembled its own global financial network by acquiring close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets. By comparison, Stripe holds roughly half that number at best .

These licenses aren't regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for instance, Stripe and Square can process payments but must immediately transfer funds to the merchant's bank account. Airwallex, with its fund transfer operator license, can hold those funds inside its ecosystem. This allows customers to issue bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without it ever leaving the platform. The foreign exchange economics alone are substantial: a U.S. merchant settling transactions in Australian dollars avoids the 2 to 3 percent conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge and can use those local balances to pay local vendors, run payroll, and cover digital marketing expenses, all at interbank rates .

Getting these licenses has been immensely time-consuming. In Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to acquire shell companies whose licenses were no longer being issued by central banks, then rebuild the technology underneath them entirely. Zhang noted the complexity of this approach: "You can't really vibe-code an integration with Mexico's central bank. We have to have a secure room; you have to do a biometric scan just to walk in to access the central bank integration" .

Zhang

Steps to Understanding Airwallex's Infrastructure-First Strategy

• License Acquisition: Airwallex holds close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets, creating regulatory barriers that competitors cannot easily replicate and giving the company direct access to local payment rails and banking systems.
• Fund Control: Unlike payment processors that must immediately transfer merchant funds to bank accounts, Airwallex can hold balances within its ecosystem, enabling customers to issue cards, manage payroll, and conduct international transactions without leaving the platform.
• Interbank Pricing: By controlling the end-to-end payment workflow, Airwallex can offer customers interbank foreign exchange rates rather than the 2 to 3 percent markups charged by traditional processors, creating substantial cost savings for international merchants.

The slow build was intentional. Zhang has a framework he returns to often: the "path of maximum resistance." Every license, every bank integration, every local payment rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled has created a layer that makes it harder to compete against. "It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue," Zhang explained. "But after that, it took just over three years to get to a billion" .

How Are Airwallex and Stripe Now Competing Directly?

For most of their lives, Airwallex and Stripe have largely operated in different geographies and sold to different buyers. That dynamic is changing. As Stripe pushes deeper into international markets, and Airwallex makes its first serious moves into the United States, the overlap is growing. Historically, Airwallex's buyer has been the CFO's office in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well-established. This puts it in a different sales motion than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has been driven largely by U.S. developers choosing a default starting point for a new company .

More than 90 percent of Airwallex customers land first on a business account product, with payments and spend management following from there. Over half are using multiple products. However, Zhang acknowledges significant challenges. The biggest may be that Stripe is Silicon Valley's golden child, its privately held shares having minted millionaires across the tech industry. Another is the accompanying brand gap. Airwallex needs to embed itself in the thinking of engineers and developers, not just finance teams, so that founders reach for it instinctively. "Our brand is just not there yet," Zhang said. "That's a harder competition to win" .

Zhang

Sequoia backed Airwallex early, positioning the venture capital firm to benefit from the company's trajectory . The competition between these two fintech giants is being watched closely from a variety of vantage points across Silicon Valley, as both companies vie for dominance in the global payments infrastructure market.