Australian-born global fintech Airwallex will hire more than 300 staff in the next year, recruiting staff in areas as varied as infrastructure, regulatory compliance, customer care, and AI as it fights a skills shortage that head of product Shannon Scott believes can only be overcome by offering candidates fresh growth opportunities and the right culture.
Airwallex – which was created in 2015 to solve challenges that its founders had encountered in managing foreign-exchange payments for the café they ran together – has exploded in recent years, becoming Australia’s fastest growing unicorn on the back of an aggressive expansion strategy focused on helping customers collect, manage and spend their funds across different currencies, countries, and regulatory environments.
“The engineers working here in Australia are actually building products for customers all around the world,” Scott told iTnews.
“On top of that infrastructure, we’re building this really interesting business process software as well. We may have started in foreign exchange, but our teams have developed and work across a full suite of software – from card issuance and treasury management to bill payments, expense management, and even fully embedded payment acceptance.”
“And because we’re still operating in that rapid scale-up phase, there’s less bureaucracy or layers to move through.”
Growth at the speed of innovation
Rather than focusing on one monolithic platform, Airwallex’s product-based portfolio has grown organically through rapid development and release cycles, with new products such as Bill Pay designed to simplify business operations – and the recently released Yield reflecting Airwallex’s long-term mission to disrupt traditional banking itself.
Yield – which lets customers access better-than-bank returns on deposits with no restrictions by leveraging Airwallex’s investment into JP Morgan Liquidity Funds – represents the type of sophisticated investment tool that the company has used to differentiate itself.
There are more to come: having just clocked 104% year-on-year business growth after adding 200 staff during 2023, Airwallex is accelerating its hiring pace and plans to add another 300 staff during 2024.
“We've got ambitious growth plans,” Scott said, “but we always maintain the high standards we've set for who we hire.”
The company’s focus on building novel financial services, many of which have been collaboratively designed and delivered based on customer requests, has also proven rewarding for the 1400-employee company’s army of software engineers, product specialists, marketing, regulatory, customer engagement, and other specialists.
“You can bring together a team from different departments, and get the product out to market very quickly,” Scott said. “It’s really rewarding for employees to actually see their products go to market – and if that’s happening on very short cycles, they’re getting that reward and feedback very closely.”
“That feedback allows employees to develop their own experiences, so they understand how their product was received, how it can be improved, and how we can take it to the next level.”
Bridging the fintech skills gap
For all the promise of higher salaries that the IT industry offers, employee satisfaction has emerged as being equally important to both retaining staff and keeping them productively engaged – a challenge that has cost governments billions and forced companies to think flexibly as they work to create a projected 340,000 new tech jobs this decade.
And while finding hundreds of engineers and fintech specialists in a tough labour market is no easy task – 75% of the 250 financial services IT decision makers responding to a recent FDM Group survey said their organisation has struggled to fill jobs requiring digital skills – Airwallex has worked to stay on the front foot.
Partnerships with universities have helped keep Airwallex in the orbit of new graduates, for example, with extensive networking driving referrals from satisfied staff to their friends and peers.
“Working closely with the universities, to look for that next generation of talent coming through, is a very strong pipeline for us,” Scott said.
The business has also worked to directly support the next generation of engineers as part of a $3 million scholarship program through the University of Melbourne.
With Airwallex growing from a US$1 billion unicorn in 2019 to its most recent US$5.6 billion valuation, share ownership is a key part of its compensation – giving staff a chance to benefit from the results of their hard work.
With 20 offices in 11 countries – and Mexico recently joining the list after Airwallex announced its intent to acquire Mexican payment company MegPago – the international office network also offers a broad range of diverse projects for the staff in Airwallex’s Melbourne office and recently opened Sydney office.
Working in a globally-focused company, Scott said, creates ample opportunity for staff to diversify their experience, gain from exposure to other workplace cultures and business needs, and develop in-demand skills in areas such as the governance of international money flows.
Ultimately, Scott is confident the opportunity to iteratively innovate, in an environment with a flat management structure and short product cycles, will offer ample motivation for challenge-loving developers to stay and help Airwallex take the fight to the established banking system.
“As our customers get more savvy, they’re hungry for us to provide additional solutions to help them better manage their finances,” he said.
“For those employees who really do want to get fast feedback cycles and have ownership of the products they’re building, we really stand out amongst a very small number of great tech companies in Australia.”
