What Innovation Looks Like at Airwallex ANZ: A Culture of Growth

Airwallex has been recognised by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) as one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies in Australia, in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Category for 2024. 

Airwallex was recognised this year in part for our category-disrupting product, Yield. Yield is a first-of-its-kind feature that gives customers the opportunity to earn competitive returns on AUD and USD funds. After a successful limited release in 2023, this year we were delighted to lower the minimum investment threshold for the product to make it available to all Aussie customers. 

But Yield is just one example of our commitment to innovation. As a team, it’s baked into our DNA. We were founded to reimagine traditional financial operations, and that inquisitive and disruptive spirit guides everything we do. 

To explore how these values come to life across the business, we asked a few members of the ANZ team about what innovation at Airwallex looks like to them. Watch the video, or read on below for more.

Percy, Software Engineer II

I think innovation is about
identifying existing problems and client pain points,
and trying to utilise the most cutting-edge solutions
to build an optimal
or long-term solution approach from a domain perspective.

Izzy, Content Marketing Manager

I definitely think innovation,
for me being in the marketing team, is always trying new things. In marketing, there's a lot of ways to do something.
So really being able to come together
and collaborate to do something different is important.


Having worked
for other businesses in the past
that have been very set in their ways
or scared to experiment, it doesn't work for me.
I think we've got to keep building
and we're only going to build something better if we
feel empowered to innovate.
So that's why I'm glad we get to do it here.


Robert, Software Engineering

So innovation for me is all about using what we have currently to build the future. The tools today aren't
the same tools we had five years ago, so you have to keep on top of what's available now.
The latest example's probably been the AI revolution, in the 1980s it was the internet.
Innovation is using these new building
blocks to build the future.


What's really exciting, is as these tools grow
and mature, the problems
that you can solve become a lot bigger. But you have to keep doing it. It's very easy to just sit down
and use the system that you have.
Some companies would do
that and they become really successful,
but then they stop innovating and then eventually they'll just become redundant. So innovation is staying on top of those trends
and really building out the future.


David, Software Engineer II

I think it's about out-of-the-box thinking, brainstorming new ideas,
and trying to bring them to life.
I think it involves a lot of continuous learning
because you have to learn new things and experiment. You're going to fail a lot of the time, but when you succeed it's really cool,
and it can deliver a lot of value.

Emmanuel, Senior Software Engineer

What innovation means to me is
being able to solve novel, deeply
challenging technical problems that no one knows the answers to,
and that you have to figure out by yourself
and with the help of your team.

Tim, Workplace Experience Partner

At Airwallex we're building
amazing products for our customers and amazing interactions
for our commercial team,
but from a workplace experience point of view, a lot
of the innovation comes into
how can we develop better processes
and systems to enable us to provide
that experience for people here.


At the moment,
I've been collaborating with our Singapore team on creating
better processes, that can be rolled out globally. Innovation is also looking at developing
budget trackers and event trackers for us to see what is and isn’t working for our teams. What do our teams love when they're here in the office?
What do our teams want be engaged
with when they're here in the office?
That's how I look at our innovation.

Lian, Senior Software Engineer

I think innovation
for me is first from the product perspective.
Airwallex was founded to build a payment platform
for our customers initially, which is highly dependent on FX conversions, for example.
But nowadays we integrate more products – we're not just a payment platform,
we're essentially becoming a financial ecosystem for our customers.


From an engineers perspective, we constantly introduce cutting-edge technology to the team
and improve processes to smooth the introduction of new technologies.
Engineers can just write documents for review and provide a proof of concept
to see whether it works, for example.
And we just adopt it if we need it.

Alex, Engineering Director

We have the ambition.
We have the desire to be successful
and we don't run away from complexity.
We run towards it, and I think that yields incredible outcomes.

Do the most ambitious (and innovative) work of your career

Are you interested in joining a truly innovative business with a passionate and purpose-driven team? We’d love to chat! Join us in building the global payments and financial platform of the future.

Visit our Careers page to view our open roles, or check out our Culture blog to take a sneak peek behind the scenes at our Melbourne and Sydney offices. 

The Airwallex Yield Liquidity Fund (Yield) is issued by K2 Asset Management Limited (K2) (ABN 95 085 445 094, AFSL No 244393), a wholly owned subsidiary of K2 Asset Management Holdings Limited. This information doesn’t take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Read the Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) and Financial Services Guide (FSG) for Yield, available at www.airwallex.com.au/terms from Airwallex Capital Pty Ltd (ABN 37 609 653 312, AFSL No. 549026). All investments carry risk.