EP 341 – Is Asia the Next FinTech Hub? – Jon Stona – VP Global Marketing at Airwallex

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:07
Awesome, Jon, thank you so much for coming and doing this. I really appreciate your time. Look, let’s just jump right into this conversation. What is airwallex? Just tell us. What is it? Why was it conceived? How did it happen? Why are we here?

Jon Stona 0:19
Yeah, for sure. First of all, thank you so much, Michael for having me on board. Certainly, certainly a joy, joy to be here. So I know you have you’re quite an international audience. I appreciate some folks might not be as familiar with Airwallex, but the TLDR is that we are one of the globe’s leading payments and financial platforms. And so what we do is we help businesses of all shapes and sizes manage everything from payments, spend management, money movement all the way to embedded finance. So the way to kind of think about this in more simple terms is it’s almost like a like a financial operating system for your business. So more of a modern day alternative to legacy banking.

Michael Waitze 0:54
Got it a modern day alternative to legacy banking. So this is the other thing. When I was talking to somebody about this yesterday, yeah, is there a bank account replacement? Do people need bank accounts today? Do you know what I mean? Like, how does an E wallet work in relation to banks? Like, how would you explain this to people?

Jon Stona 1:10
Yeah. I mean, I don’t necessarily think you need a bank account at a at a traditional bank, per se. I think you do need somewhere to securely hold your money, right? And there are various options to do that. And so, for example, the way that that it works with airwallex, especially if you are, say, a business that’s operating across borders. Now, in a traditional sense, let’s say you wanted to sell into five different markets. You know, potentially you’d have to go fly to these, these individual markets, fill out a bunch of paperwork, wait in line, you know, pop out your Google Translate app and figure out how to actually fill out this paperwork, whereas, in reality, when you have modern solutions like airwallex, you can just do that all from the comfort of your desk, right? And so it’s an online process. You can set up accounts around the world, and again, lets you do so in a multi currency way, so that you know you can essentially collect money in one currency, and not necessarily if, let’s say, you have to pay supplies in that same currency, you don’t have to go through that again. Legacy, painful, expensive process of having to convert and then reconvert, you essentially collecting one currency, storing one currency, and pay out in the same currency. So, you know, cheaper for businesses, saves them a lot of time in the process as well. Got

Michael Waitze 2:18
it so I worked at huge financial institutions, right? Some you may have heard of like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, little companies

Jon Stona 2:26
off to the side, smaller and smaller, they seem to be doing okay these days.

Michael Waitze 2:29
Okay, kind of okay. But there I also started in the back office. So I ended up on a trading desk, right? But I started off in the back office, and they actually did that with a lot of people, so that we could get a better understanding of, like, what happened when we did a trade, right? They actually, they actually made us read a book called What happens after the trade, which, yeah, because the idea was, you could have this really fancy idea for how to make money, but if it couldn’t get processed on the back end, then you didn’t make that money because there was no way to process it. So what I’m really interested in, before we get into some of the other stuff is, like, what actually happens on the back end of a payments? I know you’re not the tech guy, but I’m just super curious, like, what the flow is, if you can go into that, if that makes sense, because I don’t understand it yet,

Jon Stona 3:13
yeah. So, I mean, I think that the easiest way to for me to kind of explain this is think about money movement, especially across borders, as essentially money moving on a highway, right or series of highways. So when someone essentially tries to tries to pay you, there are a bunch of kind of different players involved in that chain. Let’s say an acquirer, an acquiring bank, a gateway, but essentially, folks that help you take money from an end customer and then process it and move it across a highway so that, fundamentally, at some juncture, gets to your destination from that highway. Now, the problem in a kind of legacy world is that along that highway there are kind of different intermediary banks, and so everyone kind of takes a bit of a toll, right? And so imagine, again, a legacy world where you have this gigantic highway running from one country to another, and then you have all these toll gates, whereas, you know, air walks, his approach was, and I can talk a little bit about the founding store, because it’s actually quite, quite an interesting one, yeah, is we’re going to kind of bypass that highway, we’re going to bypass that legacy system and essentially build our own, you know, proprietary infrastructure so that you have a much shorter highway. You don’t necessarily have people collecting tolls at every stop, but you really when you think about about FinTech and money movement is essentially moving from point A to point B, and then running across across a highway. Right now, I think you asked me a little bit earlier about airwalks company, how it was founded. I think about, if I kind of take a step back, please talk a little bit about something which is so inherent I think startups and entrepreneurs, and it’s almost this notion of, I. Ability to have the mindset where you kind of list, where you kind of see an obstacle as an opportunity. And when you think about some of the most powerful and well known startups in the world, a lot of them have actually come from this, from, from this grounded, ground mindset, yeah. So, you know, I’m sure you, you know, Canva, for example, do you kind of have a sense of how Canva was, was kind of conceived so, so, I mean, Canva, essentially, was Melanie Perkins was, you know, teaching at university, and she was teaching design programs like Photoshop and InDesign, and she thought they were just so complex and difficult. They are, no take an entire, yeah,

Michael Waitze 5:37
I use them all the time, very complicated,

Jon Stona 5:39
yeah, yeah. And it would take an entire semester for people to just learn the basics. And so a lot of people cared about about design. And so, you know, wanted to create good content, but content but didn’t have the right tools. And so that frustration helped her conceive of Canva, right? I mean, same thing with Zoom. You know, Eric Yuan, the co founder, the founder of zoom, excuse me. You know, Zoom was conceived. The initial concept, when I think Eric was was in, was in university, he would talk about taking these long train rides to see his girlfriend at the time, now his wife. And you know, he’s there sitting in these painfully long journeys, thinking, My goodness, Surely there must be a better way to actually connect with loved ones. And exactly right. Not take 10 hours every time. And so again, a real frustration that, you know, bore fruit for this, for this opportunity, air walks, is actually no different. So a couple of the founders, in particular, Jack and Max, they were actually running a coffee shop, a cafe in Melbourne. I love this. And you know, when, when you’re running a coffee shop, you obviously have to buy a lot of goods and items, you know, plates and cups and straws and napkins, etc, and and typically, you’re probably sourcing these from from global suppliers. And they just got so frustrated on a day to day basis because they would have to pay these international suppliers. And like we spoke about at the start, you know, sometimes it would take three to five days. Yeah, they’d get hit with these, you know, enormous transaction fees. Yeah, sometimes it wouldn’t even get there. You know, maybe there was a return of the transaction. They have to start all over again. It was just again, a painful process. And so, you know, that kind of gave the foundation and, you know, emphasis to say, when we think about money movement, there must be a better way to do this more efficiently. And you know what started off as selling lattes. This is probably one of the biggest pivots InsurTech history, selling lattes in Melbourne to selling global financial infrastructure and being, you know, $100 billion you know, processing per year, right? So really a phenomenal story. And again, that whole notion of mindset, you know, obstacles to opportunities, is so foundational to entrepreneurs, and so foundational to air wallets and the folks that we serve. It’s a little

Michael Waitze 7:50
bit of a it’s a little bit of a side point, but I want to corroborate this. I was teaching a couple years ago a class on innovation to kids like 19 year olds and 20 year olds, and I just they’re like, Where does innovation come from? And what do you say to them? Think about a problem you have that you complain to your friends about all the time, and that they also have, and that your parents have, and all of you are sitting around going, shouldn’t somebody who’s gonna solve this problem? That’s, yeah, that’s your innovation. Like, that’s how innovation happens, right? Exactly.

Jon Stona 8:19
I will say though, that innovation, though it requires that the ideation, but it also requires the action Absolutely. And I think that that really oftentimes separates, you know, good entrepreneurs to kind of truly great entrepreneurs. Yeah, that ability to actually internalize that in your day to day life as well, you know, can have immense returns on your kind of personal life also,

Michael Waitze 8:40
yeah. I mean, look, everybody has ideas. Very few people can actually execute any of those ideas. Can we? Can we get back to this highway thing for a second? Because I want to understand just a little bit better. And by the way, now that you’ve told me this story, I feel like the airwallex name was, like, really, like, there was a reason behind it. It was almost like the Airbnb for wallets, but they probably couldn’t get the T, so they just said, Screw it, we’ll take the x. Like, I love this. I must be close to this. No. Well,

Jon Stona 9:09
I mean that the x was really because of the Forex piece at the start. So originally, again, one of the first use cases was that kind of efficient, yeah, but now it’s just morphed into so much more, right? Yeah.

Michael Waitze 9:20
So let’s talk about the highways. Does that mean, right? That airwallex basically has an account, a bank account, kind of, I’m not gonna say, everywhere in the world, but in most countries in the world where they operate. And I’m simplifying to make the point, right, so that if I want to move money right, like if I’m in Boston, but I have to pay somebody in yen, they’re not doing an FX trade with my dollars. They’re taking my dollars into their account, right? And then they’re taking yen from an account already in Tokyo and sending it to that supplier in Japan. So they’re eliminating the necessity at most times, to actually do the effects through the traditional foreign exchange system. Is that what’s happening? Yeah,

Jon Stona 9:54
essentially, we’re kind of bypassing a lot of the kind of legacy approaches, but we’re also making sure that particularly when it comes to. To payouts as well. Oftentimes, we’re kind of integrated with kind of local rails also, or local local payments. And so you’re kind of bypassing the entire, the entire swift process, but in terms of kind of banking partners as well. I mean, you know, security and compliance certainly one of the most important aspects of fintech. And so, you know, we have, we have so many kind of top tier banking partners around the world, and licenses, you know, all around the world as well, right? So we take that aspect incredibly, incredibly seriously. Yeah, I

Michael Waitze 10:29
mean, at the end of the day, you’re going to have to deal with the bank, because that’s where the that’s where the actual money is sitting, right? But it’s the layer on top of the bank that you’re building, and the way you connect to them, bypassing, like you said, all the traditional highways, building your own highway, so you don’t have to pay for it every time you use it, exactly.

Jon Stona 10:43
And then also building, building on top of that, top of the infrastructure, I think what really is, what’s, you know, driving along the momentum as well, is the kind of software layer. Because we do, again, want to be that financial operating system. And when we realize that the kind of treasury aspect is one aspect, but when you think about, you know, areas like expense management, right? That’s kind of software layer that kind of comes on top to make the value proposition that much more kind of sticky. So useful. I

Michael Waitze 11:11
want to see if I understand this again correctly, and maybe the listeners will appreciate this too. So I had the founder of deal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of deal, of course, an Israeli company, right? That basically takes away the Human Resources responsibility for companies. And the idea for deal is you focus on your core competencies, your core competency, you’re not an HR company. We’ll help you do the hiring. But also we’ll set up an entity in every country in the world. So if you want to hire somebody in Thailand, we already have all the regs and rules covered, so we can hire them directly into deal, but they’re kind of like seconded to you, and we make payments for them and do all this stuff on the HR side, so you don’t have to worry about it. Also means you don’t have to know all the rules and regs in every country. Are you suggesting that airwallex is kind of doing the same thing on the finance side? So that if I want to have the financial system, financial operating system, and use it. There’s not just payments, but it’s all the finance and regs and rules stuff. Are you basically taking that away from companies, because that’s not their core competency, so then they can use airwallex instead.

Jon Stona 12:11
Exactly. I mean, we’re abstracting away a lot of the complexity that typically is involved in, again, moving kind of money movement, and so we don’t expect you to be, you know, a payment expert. I mean, especially for if you’re running a small business and you want to expand, you probably have better things to do than read 900 pages of payment regulation, exactly. So I should hope so. Otherwise, your business probably doing that. Well, let us, let us, let us read the 900 pages of payment regulation for

Michael Waitze 12:37
you, right? So can I ask you this? A lot of the stuff that happens online falls into this category of E commerce, right? And whether it’s a B to B, E commerce business, or a B to C, E commerce business, they’re kind of the same, just the scale is different, right? So if I buy something from an online provider, it’s no different than if somebody wants to buy something from, I don’t know, from Cisco, I’m just making up a company, right? And maybe they’re buying more. The transaction amount is higher, but it’s the same type of thing. I order online, I send them some money, blah, blah, blah, do the people that are actually making the payment know that it’s airwallex? Do you know what I mean, because you’re this layer that’s there, right? But does it say powered by airwallex? How do they know? And should they know? Do you want them to know?

Jon Stona 13:19
Yes. I mean, so So oftentimes they, they don’t know. I mean, I think sometimes what will end up happening is a merchant might choose to say that the payment is powered by airwallex, mainly as a symbol of trust, yeah, right, just to say, you know, don’t worry, this will be secure. You can trust this with, with this transaction. So again, stamp sample, kind of approval and credibility, but oftentimes we’re at that infrastructure layer. And so, you know, we work very much with a merchant, not necessarily the end consumer. And so we our job is to is to make the merchant’s life easier. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 13:53
this, though, and this is something, just something you brought up, actually, in the prep call. So I really want to talk about this. I How do you do how do you start this company, right, or compete with the other companies, right? You talked about this idea of a challenger brand. I think it’s really interesting, right? Because the space is already there. There are plenty of other payment companies. Not all of them get to be that big. But how do you do that and compete in this space where the competition is so strong? And then the next thing is, I love this idea of most people are building, like, sort of over there on the western part of the world and trying to go, like, I’m gonna expand to Asia, which, good luck with that, because it’s really hard. But these guys did this. These guys did this in reverse. But I will say this, I don’t know how familiar you are with, like, the first I’ll say, great. I don’t know Australian software company, which was called sausage software, which was started in Melbourne, I believe. So it’s not the there is precedent for this, but it’s not often, right? So go ahead, maybe tell me all this stuff, like, how hard is it in this space? And then, how do you scale from east to west, as opposed to West from East? I.

Jon Stona 15:00
Yeah, you know, it’s not easy. I will say it certainly wasn’t easy for for Jack and Max and Lucy and the team to actually, and CJ is our CTO to actually get air walks up and running. And as many startups, you know, there were the ups and the downs and, you know, a lot of pivots along the way. But I think I’ve been with air walks now nearly two years I think what I really come to appreciate, especially these are the kind of other companies I’ve either worked up or partnered with in the space, is just the obsession with understanding the real user pain points. Like, you know, I know a lot of people talk about product market fits and user research, etc, but really the obsession about trying to find every kind of ounce of nuance about what is a true pain, and then having product velocity to repeatedly kind of iterate and build into this pain, I think, I think really has allowed the company to flourish The second aspect, and when we talk about FinTech, I think oftentimes, you know, people bias too much on the tech side of fintech. And to be fair, I think airwalks, again, has superb technology, great engineering, Prague team. But what people sometimes don’t understand about Fintech is a real human aspect of it. Because if I go back to the to the highway analogy, right, when you have really strong engineers, sometimes what ends up happening is you just build a faster car that goes on the same highway. Yeah, what you don’t but that that only kind of gets you so far in order to kind of transform what you want to do is you essentially want to make sure that you can get off the highway. You want to have an off ramp. And so the part that that many people sometimes under appreciate is a real kind of partnership motion that’s involved in building all these local relationships and partnerships with banks and local payment providers and whatnot, because that takes time. Yeah, and that, in many ways, is defensible. You can’t engineer that overnight. That’s a really human connection and investment. And so I think what air walks has done really well. And I think why the growth has been fairly rapid is because we’ve invested in both at a kind of commensurate degree. Yeah, now the brand piece, in terms of going forward, I think that’s where, that’s where my job comes in. If I’m doing my job is my team is doing a job well, a big part of kind of entering some of these newer markets, and when we again go kind of east to west is is coming in and not essentially appearing as a commoditized plus one offering. Yeah. And so look at this from a couple ways. I think one, the product suite has to be differentiated enough where, if you look at our pair suites, usually the top players in the space tend to do one thing really well, either really good at accepting money, or they’re really good about transferring money, or they’re really good about expense management. And so you’re in a world where, again, if I’m a small business or medium sized business, I probably don’t have the time to kind of maintain, you know, 5678, different financial tools where airwallex Kind of has had the insight is you really stitch it end to end. So from accepting to holding to converting to paying out, then having that expense management layer on top bill payments, it really, truly is end to end. So there’s that product piece that’s kind of critical as a kind of first area of importance. But then on top of that, the marketing comes in, because you have to articulate that, yeah, you have to let people know and cut above the noise. And that is where the branding aspect is so important, and how you do that it, I think it comes down a lot to kind of trust building, especially in financial services. If you don’t have trust, then you don’t even have a ticket to the party knocking on the door saying, you know, please, please, please, let me in. I think that the framework that that I think about when kind of building doing trust for for any brand, and especially as we think about internationally, is, you know, have you ever done, you know, those workshops where they usually with kind of people and talent and HR, where they talk about interpersonal dynamics, and they kind of break down the trust equation. Trust is reliability, credibility, intimacy, all over, self orientation. You from, yeah,

Michael Waitze 19:20
so I worked at a big company,

Jon Stona 19:23
usually, exactly. So you’ve gone through this trade, you know, 17 times, right? Usually, people really apply that to kind of interpersonal dynamics, but if you take a step back, that actually can be applied to brand building as well. Absolutely, it’s the same assets that are necessary to kind of building that brand. And so what we’ve tried to do is deconstruct that and to say, well, if it comes down to, let’s say, kind of intimacy, then how you go about intimacy is really get deep with the community. It’s not just about big industry events. It’s micro influencers. It’s investing in kind of local communities, grassroots, kind of movements. If. It’s about credibility. It’s, you know, the social proof. It’s about, you know, sponsorships. You know, we talked about McLaren, that was a big investment for us, yeah, but it was really to kind of drive that credibility as well. And I mean, self orientation, being a true partner, championing, you know, small businesses, championing those kind of step changes in the space. And so, you know, if we deconstruct it, that’s a lot of how we’re approaching new market entry, especially from a from a brand perspective. I want to, I want

Michael Waitze 20:26
to get back to the branding in a second. But you I want to put two things together, right? Because you said some of these financial tech companies are fintechs, right? You said, do one thing really well, but they miss the rest of the stack. Yeah. But then we also talked earlier about how some companies build all these products and they’re just way too complex, right? How do you balance this idea of, we do everything for you, but there’s no complexity with it, right? Because this gets and this gets back, I think, to this trust thing where, like you can use this one thing that we do super well, right? Found it on this idea that, let’s just say that Forex should be easy, but we’re building all these other tools around it too. But when does it get to the point where it’s so complex that they’re like, I can’t use this anymore kind of thing. How do you keep that trust going so that they believe that everything that gets added is additive to them, and it’s value add? Yeah?

Jon Stona 21:15
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it comes down it’s a great question. A lot of it, I think, comes down to fundamental product design and ethos and first principles, right? I mean, how we’ve kind of designed the airwallex product is in a way, and the suite, I should say, or broader solution, is in a way that can scale with any type of business. And so if you think about a lot of our you say one kind of tranche of customers. It’s really kind of non technical, small businesses who don’t have engineers, don’t have developers, they just want to be able to get up and running, and they want a seamless solution that’s going to save them money, save them time, and just is reliable, right? But then, you know, let’s say you want more complexity, then you have the ability, almost in a modular way, to say, Okay, we’ll give you access to the API. So if you want to start doing things more programmatically and building your own custom solutions on top of your walks or with airwaves, you can do that as well. Then if you’re a platform, and you want to even take it to another degree, and you want to build your own FinTech, you know, really pursue embedded finance and create, you know, new lines of revenue for yourself through financial services, you can also approach it from a modular standpoint, and tap into the infrastructure. And so I think the way that the product has been designed, and the way that we can speak to different audiences is to say, no matter where you are in the journey, we’re not going to force you to use everything at once. We’re going to essentially give you the best option or let you choose the best option for what you need at the moment. But please know that the platform is broad enough that as you grow and as you have more use cases, you can then build into it. And we’ll be here to actually support you and grow with you. So again, a lot of it comes down to kind of, you know, foundational product design.

Michael Waitze 22:51
Can we talk a little bit about embedded finance as well? Like, where does it fit in? What are the products and where are the most traditional places where you’re embedding this stuff?

Jon Stona 23:00
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re seeing a lot of traction right now in terms in Western Europe and North America as well, because the embedded finance opportunity is really one that focuses on platforms and marketplaces. Because, I mean, you’re essentially, if you’re a platform you have, whether you are a yoga platform, a food platform, health, tech, whatever it is, edgy tech, you’ve likely done a good job of, kind of building up an entire base of loyal users. You want them to be sticky. You want to, you know, add more value to them. You want to see if you can improve your own margins, right? And so you’re starting to think about, what are new lines of revenue right? Right now it happens that a lot of this kind of platform occasion, I’m not even sure if that’s a word, the rise, there we go, right coin, copyrighted. But the the rise and kind of prevalence of these kind of large global platforms, oftentimes we see, especially in North America and Europe. I mean, increasing in Asia, but we tend to see a lot more regional platforms in Asia. Pacific global platforms tend to be, you know, born out of the west, at least for now. And so that’s where, when folks think about airwallex global infrastructure, they’re starting to say, Ah, okay, let me actually see if we can monetize more. And again, create more value to our customers.

Michael Waitze 24:21
Is there a benefit for this company actually coming from Asia? Do you know what I mean? Is there a different mindset that airwallex start with? And maybe you can talk this is the Asia tech podcast, right? So I’m just curious if there’s, like, an Asian mindset, or an Asian thought process, or a benefit of being started in Asia and then going out to the rest of the world?

Jon Stona 24:38
Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple things that come to mind. I think one is that when, particularly where we’re partnering with Western Western businesses, oftentimes, many of these businesses, they don’t know as much about Asia Pacific as they would like, Yeah, and so they kind of turn to us to say, Help us demystify the region. They. Trust us, because we’ve kind of, you know, grown a successful business in the region. So they say, well, these folks probably at least know something right about building, building a successful scale business. And so I think that that’s one, you know, major asset is just that, that regional kind of insight, I think the the second piece, you know, being born out of APAC, is this notion of of globality from from day one? And I think, you know, there obviously, you know, we can debate back and forth about, is the world becoming less global and more global? Is trade contracting, expanding? And it obviously will kind of, you know, go up and down, you know, year after year, and also response to the geopolitical climate, but fundamentally, there still is a global opportunity for trade that

Michael Waitze 25:46
is destroying the world. It’s not going

Jon Stona 25:47
away. It’s not going to it’s not going and so if you think about, if you think about a market like the US, there are many businesses in the US that don’t have this existential question to be or existential need to be global from day one. They can buy domestically, exist domestically, sell domestically. Whereas you think about APAC, you know, market like Singapore, market like Hong Kong, Vietnam, many entrepreneurs, you know exactly, these are global businesses from day one. It’s really tricky. It’s tricky to think about if, you know, if we had this conversation 10 years ago, and we use the term multinational company, you know, we’d be thinking about these big, you know, gigantic corporations, whether you know the image of the of the arms, you know, reaching out and trying to, you know, grab, sure, everywhere. But in reality, multinationals now, thanks to technology and infrastructure, you and me, yeah, I’m

Michael Waitze 26:39
a multinational, exactly, right,

Jon Stona 26:40
and so multinational, the whole concept has been uprooted and changed through technology. I think APAC just inherently understands that, and I think airwallex also inherently understands

Michael Waitze 26:52
that. Got it? It’s a great answer. Actually, I want to go back to this idea of trust, because you made me think about something, and I didn’t want to introduce you. I didn’t want to excuse me interrupt your train of thought before, but how many companies airwallex just, I’m just curious.

Jon Stona 27:07
So we have over 100,000

Michael Waitze 27:10
Perfect, okay, it’s a big number. That’s all I want to that’s all I want to establish to the audience. There’s a big number of companies that are using airwallex. It’s not just like three guys right in the basement somewhere in Auckland, like it’s a big it’s a big number, and if money’s involved, and you said this before, right in the financial services world, and I said it out loud, like if you don’t have trust, you don’t have anything, right? Because at the end of the day, you’re taking my money and doing something with and if you’re not going to do what you said you’re going to do, I can’t trust you. But airwallex has obviously built up that trust and built up a big product suite, and also has, let’s just say, over 100,000 customers. So it’s a lot of people, and a lot of people on the other side of that, because there’s 100,000 companies. If each one of them has 10 people, it’s a million people. Exactly. Do you have an insurance product that you, that you distribute to people through this platform? And should you

Jon Stona 28:01
we, don’t we? It’s, it’s, it’s a great idea. I mean, I think I’ll tell you

Michael Waitze 28:08
what, and then, and then do your answer, because I want to set this up, because if they trust you, look, I’d have the largest insurance podcast in the world, right? So I know this, and I talk about insurance all the time, right? And I have no vested interest, per se, but if you think about if you’re already talking about embedded finance, embedded insurance is a thing, and your customers, probably some of them, have protection gaps, and if they trust you, you could embed insurance products into all of your other products that you offer them, and not only would they get the coverage that they need and the protection that they need, but it could be another revenue stream for airwallex And another benefit that they could sell in this whole suite of things that you do to your clients, but also their employees. Like there’s a massive opportunity here to do that. I’m just wondering if you’ve considered that.

Jon Stona 28:56
So I think the first response to you is, we are hiring for open Senior Product roles. So you know, if some reason you get bored and you want to come, you know, come to us and, you know, no but, but, But jokes aside. I mean, I think, I think the way that the company operates is we do take a lot of cues, also from our existing customers and what we’re seeing in the market. So I think InsurTech is certainly not off the table. You know, when we when we wait against all the other priorities that we could potentially go into. I mean, there could potentially be lending, that could potentially be payroll as example, right? I think for us, you know, there’s so much that we’re building and continuing to launch and to scale that, you know, I can see it being feasible. But is it necessarily going to be the item that we ship next week, possibly not because they’re, they’re, you know, 50 other items which are probably going to get, get, get shipped next week. But the fundamental premise, I think, is sound, and certainly one which, which you know, would be, would be under, under discussion, actively,

Michael Waitze 29:54
fair enough. Okay, before I let you go, I’m really interested in the in the McLaren. Thing, particularly because the f1 is always, it always seems to be around us. It’s a gigantic platform as well. But why would a company like airwallex sponsor an f1 racing team like, what’s the idea there? What do you and what do you think the output of the end result is going to be? Besides, just like typical brand marketing, right? Because you specifically went after, like, a sector there, yeah, what was the idea? I’m super curious.

Jon Stona 30:27
Yeah. I mean, we went through several months of kind of research, because when we’re thinking about what’s the best way to kind of build a brand, and when, again, when I deconstruct it into reliability, credibility, intimacy, right? We looked across different dimensions, weighed everything from sponsorships to big out of home campaigns. And we realized sponsorships, there was actually some, you know, some, some great potential there. And then we started looking at, you know, different sports, different teams, you know, different individual athletes. I think what we liked about about f1 as a sport overall, was, again, airwallex is inherently global in nature. I mean, we serve global companies, globalism in our DNA. And that’s the same with f1 as well. You know, it’s essentially kind of a traveling roadshow. And, you know, you look at the driver lineup, you look at, you know, you create these, these moments of momentum, you know, 24 times a year in kind of different, different cities around the world, right? And so we like the kind of global nature of it. We also like the bias more towards technology and innovation and forward thinking. I mean, so much of an f1 team success comes down to the engineering of the LT and the kind of prowess. And when it came to McLaren in particular, you know, I think a few things stood out. I think one the values were definitely aligned. You know, we weren’t just gonna, you know, partner with them and just slap on a logo and then, you know, go home. That never works exactly, then it works. But I think what we saw was that, if you look at McLaren’s heritage as well, you know, Bruce McLaren essentially being somewhat of a challenger, kind of, you know, challenging status quo as a driver himself. He was with an established team, and he went off and he went off and did his kind of own entrepreneurial venture, which was McLaren, and scale to what he’s today. So there was that kind of ethos, and there was, again, also that kind of commitment to kind of forward thinking technological prowess McLaren is a lot in terms of sustainability as well. And so again, we like that forward thinking kind of nature of that team, and we also were really keen to make sure that the partnership was authentic. You know, from a brand perspective, I didn’t really care that much about, again, just putting the logo. I cared about being able to tell that authentic story of McLaren actually using airwallex products to kind of power their own payments and financial operations, because that’s how you got the credibility. You know, no one really believes you. If you just put McLaren on a billboard, they start to believe you. If there’s a case study that says, you know, we’re saving McLaren lots of time and money through our kind of own, own products, right? So I think there’s that aspect, what we want to get out of it really, again, it comes down to the the notion of the credibility. It comes down also to the intimacy. They’ve been phenomenal partners, and the fact that we can do a lot of community events with them and really kind of tap into the kind of local local cities, like in Singapore this week, for the for the Grand Prix, we have quite a fascinating exhibit happening where we’re going to unveil this kind of first of its kind, 3d perception shifting sculpture of McLaren’s, one of McLaren’s drivers land of Norris. Well, we where exactly it was done by so it’s at 39 plus art space. And if you’re familiar with Singapore Townsend pagar, yep. So it’s a 19 through three to the 22nd but um, it’s, it’s being done and conceived by this phenomenal, kind of world renowned artist, Michael Murphy. So Michael, Michael’s out of New York, and you know, if you’re not familiar with his work, he’s just done some iconic, you know, perception shifting sculptures for, you know, featuring Barack Obama and, you know, Messi and Michael Jordan. And so, you know, when we also think about approaching brand in a different way, as a challenger, you know, airwalks isn’t partnering with McLaren and just doing a bunch of boring talking head videos that, you know, you know, show the car going around and these, you know, cheesy analogies around, you know, speed and efficient like, No, we’re showing up. And we’re trying to, trying to have a different approach. We’re trying to weave in culture and arts, and so that’s, again, how we think about building that challenger brand and cutting a lot of the noise. Super interesting.

Michael Waitze 34:27
Okay, I’m gonna let you go. Jon Stona of Vice President Global Marketing at Airwallex, this was super interesting. I’m really glad you did this. This should not be the last time we have you on the show.

Jon Stona 34:38
I would be delighted to come back. Michael, thank you so much for your time as well, and for all that you do in the Asia tech space as well, certainly a joint village.

Michael Waitze 34:46
Thank you.