Airwallex Enters In-Person Payments, Taking On Stripe, Square and Adyen With Global Infrastructure Edge

Australian fintech Airwallex, which has spent a decade quietly building out end-to-end global payment infrastructure, is expanding into the in-person payments space. This new move not only intensifies its rivalry with Stripe across the entire payments ecosystem, but also allows the high-growth startup to compete directly with Square and Adyen on one of the final major contested frontiers in financial technology.

Airwallex is launching a new point-of-sale (POS) product that offers a unique feature missing from most rival offerings: it lets businesses accept in-person payments across multiple countries through a single unified platform, eliminating the need to onboard separate local vendors in every new market they enter.

“When a business expands into a new market, they typically have to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance rules, and manage yet another separate set of vendor relationships,” Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang told TechCrunch.

Back in 2019, Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion, at a time when the Australian startup only generated $2 million in annual revenue. Zhang ultimately walked away from the deal, even after initially agreeing to terms during months of negotiations. “What actually made me change my mind was when I flew back to Melbourne and reconnected with the original motivation that pushed me to build Airwallex,” he recalled.

Zhang founded Airwallex in 2015, born out of his own frustration with the friction and high costs of moving money across international borders. He took a different approach than most fintech startups: spending years building Airwallex’s own core underlying payment rails from scratch, rather than layering on top of third-party infrastructure.

Today, Airwallex carries an $8 billion valuation from its investors, and reports around $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, growing roughly 85% year over year. The startup says it currently serves more than 46,000 U.S.-based businesses and processes $100 billion in annual transaction volume.

To date, the company holds close to 90 regulatory licenses across roughly 50 global markets, maintains direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries, and supports transaction settlement in more than 90 currencies. Zhang argues this deep localized infrastructure is something Stripe and Square lack in critical ways — most notably, local banking licenses that allow funds to be held, converted, and deployed within a market, rather than requiring immediate repatriation of all funds.

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“Stripe and Square can process payments in Japan,” Zhang explained, “but when you actually process the payment, you need to immediately pay out to the merchant’s bank account. You can’t hold the funds.” Airwallex’s license in Japan — which took seven years to secure — enables it to do exactly that.

The company’s new POS product extends its existing global infrastructure to physical checkout counters. Its updated platform unifies in-store and online payment processing, offers centralized reporting, and integrates directly with businesses’ back-office systems. For cross-border operators, all store locations across different countries can run on the same payment system and reconcile all transactions in one place, eliminating the messy tangle of separate local vendor relationships.

Publicly traded Dutch payments firm Adyen already makes a similar pitch around its global unified infrastructure, and is arguably Airwallex’s most direct competitor in this in-person space. On the legacy end of the market, Fiserv, as well as the newly merged combination of Global Payments and Worldpay, hold massive market share among traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, though their core architectures are far older than Airwallex’s.

It remains an open question whether businesses with established Stripe or Square relationships will find Airwallex’s global infrastructure argument compelling enough to switch providers. Airwallex is betting that multinational companies tired of managing a separate payments vendor in every country will favor its all-in-one product.

“What’s really amazing is that there hasn’t been any real meaningful competition to Stripe in the last 15 years, even when you consider how enormous this market is,” Zhang said.