As I reflect on the trajectory that Airwallex has had, it’s clear to me that we wouldn’t be where we are without our people. In the last nine years, growing as a CEO alongside Airwallex has been a journey for me, and I hope all who join our team have a similarly meaningful experience of personal and professional growth.
Nothing is more important to me than our people. I want Airwallex to be a company where people are inspired to do the most impactful work of their careers and to have fun and be rewarded for doing it. We have had some missteps in this area in the past, as many start-ups do.
Looking forward, I want to double down on our commitment to empower our employees and highlight some of the mistakes we made in the hope it will help other startups to do things differently.
In our early years, we often hired on experience alone, but over time we learned that intellectual curiosity and merit were far stronger indicators of success in a company that is rapidly innovating. We also under-invested in our people and talent team – a strategic error that took us several years to rectify as we sought to build a dynamic culture and nurturing employee experience. This hurt us as we didn’t respond quickly enough to employee pain points while building our business at a rapid pace.
In the past two years, our company has matured in many ways. We’ve invested heavily in our people and talent team to help build a positive and thriving culture for our 1600+ employees. I’ve been consistently impressed by the ambitious talent we have hired and their ability to digest complex problems and propose creative solutions that vastly improve legacy approaches.
The company’s most recent H1 2024 employee survey saw 85 percent engagement and 92 percent sense of purpose scores – our highest yet, with a 92 percent participation rate across the company. It’s a promising sign of our actions to date. This has included reinvigorating our team-building events and redesigning our local and global town halls to provide regular updates on our business to help employees understand how their work relates to our business strategy. We have introduced more fireside chats and “ask me anything” sessions with myself and other global leaders to encourage transparency and connectedness, and these actions continue to evolve along with our culture.
Our score on performance management is also on the uptick at 89 percent – a positive sign of how manager training launched earlier this year is helping our people leaders engage more effectively with their teams. Growth and development scores are holding steady at 80 percent as we continue to build a more structured approach to mid-year and annual reviews to focus on immediate feedback and long-term career development for employees.
The below chart tracks our employee engagement score globally over the past 18 months.
We also remain focused on the wellbeing of our employees. Non-negotiables for us include healthcare, mental wellness, and volunteer leave. In addition, every employee has equity in the business as we believe in rewarding everyone for what we’re collectively building. As we’re growing rapidly and geographically distributed among 23 offices globally (including Australia and Singapore), we’ve also established operating principles that define who we are and how we work together towards our goals.
As we seek to hire an additional 400 employees over the coming months, we are looking for people who add to our culture, and not just fit in. We must be better every day so we can continue to deliver on our mission to help businesses thrive. And I’m very much aware that we can’t do that without our number one asset – our people.
When I read some of our employees’ stories about how Airwallex has allowed them to pivot their careers, I see how our culture has grown roots. The sense of optimism, curiosity, determination and resilience in our people is clear and it’s these two quotes in particular that resonate with me:
“... it’s not about crossing the finish line, but about showing up, day after day, even when things get tough, it’s about embracing the process, the struggles, the small wins and everything in between.”
“... growth happens when we let go of limiting beliefs, embrace the unknown… it could be something as small as seeing feedback as the path to improvement, rather than criticism - small shifts in perspective can spark big changes.”
This is a reflection of the company we are building and as we scale, our culture will continue to build one person at a time, one win at a time. We are building the global economic infrastructure that will empower businesses of all sizes to grow beyond borders. We are on our way and have together hit some significant milestones:
- In August 2024, our annual transaction volume hit US$100 billion, that’s 73% year-on-year growth. A sign that our 100,000+ customers are growing their use of Airwallex across their businesses.
- Our ARR had exceeded US$500 million in Aug 2024.
- We’re valued at US$5.6 billion and have raised over US$900 million in funding from some of the most reputable investors in the world including Sequoia, DST, Greenoaks and Lone Pine.
As employees build their careers at Airwallex, we press ahead with technology at our core, building infrastructure and applications to empower businesses to operate anywhere, anytime, allowing entrepreneurs, business builders, makers and creators to access opportunities in every corner of the world.
The opportunity to build a durable impact on the global economy by being part of team Airwallex is immense. I hope the investments we are making in people and culture allow employees to do some of the most rewarding and impactful work of their lives.
