Cin7 and Airwallex champion customer experience with new partnership

Cin7 is a fast-growing cloud-based inventory management platform that empowers product sellers to thrive. With millions of sales orders flowing through their platform each month, their next-generation tools are helping to fuel the growth of businesses of all sizes. 

Enter Airwallex, another platform that is passionate about business growth and streamlining operations with smart tech. Through a new partnership, Airwallex and Cin7 are introducing the first embedded vendor payment solution for Xero users, via a ‘Pay with Airwallex’ button. 

We spoke with Arun Kumar, Global Director of Technology and Strategic Partnerships at Cin7, about what this exciting integration means for users of both platforms, and why partnering on new initiatives is so essential for tech innovation. 

A common thread between two missions

When establishing a partnership, it’s always important to recognise alignment between two companies. With Airwallex and Cin7, the synergies couldn’t be more obvious. 

At the heart of everything we do, Airwallex wants to empower modern businesses to grow beyond borders. No matter how big or small a business is, we want to make growth feel seamless and limitless. Cin7’s objective is also centred around ease of growth, and the fact that any business can shoot for big ambitions - they only need the right tools to support them.

“Our mission is to make selling as easy as buying,” says Arun. “This means offering connected inventory performance, enabling payments between the brand and the end customer. But there’s also the front end of the supply chain to consider. How do you as a brand or product seller deal with your vendors and suppliers?”

This thought, fuelled by the Cin7 mission, was the catalyst for connecting with Airwallex and integrating our Bill Pay product.  

Arun Kumar

Global Director of Technology and Strategic Partnerships, Cin7

“We pay attention to user experience and in-context accomplishment of whatever our users' daily tasks are. So putting on that hat, we wanted somebody like Airwallex to be an active partner to enable our sellers to seamlessly pay their vendors and suppliers.”

Creating a seamless platform experience 

To make sure that the user’s journey is smooth and easy, they need to be able to trust that their information easily transcends key platforms; inventory, payments and accounting. This element was essential for Arun. 

“We asked – how do we offer a better UX? How do we do it in-context?” he says. 

“Between the accounting platform, the payment platform and Cin7, the process can become disjointed. Then you’ve got to enable manual processes to make sure they are all synced up.”

Arun Kumar

Global Director of Technology and Strategic Partnerships, Cin7

“To avoid that, we wanted to make the process a single button. We wanted the user to give the ‘easy button’ a push, and everything will be seamlessly flowing across systems. That's the reason we wanted to partner with Airwallex.”

Easy button, easy business 

An ‘easy button’ certainly sounds appealing, but what do the tangible benefits look like for users? Ultimately, this new feature can help businesses save time, and improve accuracy. 

“We thought - how do we bring together everything in the single pane of glass to enable various things that your end user at the client would want to accomplish, and do that with as few clicks as possible?”

Reducing clicks reduces time spent on admin, but it can also give users greater confidence in their actions. 

Arun Kumar

Global Director of Technology and Strategic Partnerships, Cin7

“The most obvious benefit is the gain in time. But it's the overall efficiency that the user gains by avoiding all the manual tasks. And it's not just efficiency, it's also accuracy. The more the automation driven data exchange between platforms, the more accurate it's going to be.”

Sticky SaaS creates serious value

A favourite term in the SaaS industry is “stickiness”; how can you make your platform more compelling to an existing user and harder to part from? How can you get your users as ‘stuck’ to your product as possible? 

You need to create more value from them, and effective partnerships do exactly that. 

“A highly satisfied customer is going to be sticky, right?” says Arun. “And in the SaaS context stickiness is be-all, end-all. Even if for some reason the user were to consider an alternate platform, the more value-add partner integrations that we put in place, it's tougher to part from.”

Arun Kumar

Global Director of Technology and Strategic Partnerships, Cin7

“We strongly believe in technology, partnerships, and ecosystem being a great lever for growth, the primary reason being that it’s total solutions that deliver value to clients.”

It's a type of thinking that has always existed at Cin7, and one that Airwallex shares wholeheartedly. Instead of trying to create every feature to serve every single need, partner with other platforms that your users know and love. The ultimate value is in the ecosystem of great platforms. 

“No software vendor, in my opinion, can be everything, so we’ve got to rely on other software to provide total solutions. This thinking is driven all the way from our CEO who used to be the Chief Product Officer and strongly believes in partnerships.”

“This means we’re always going to leverage partners like Airwallex for mutual growth and most importantly, delivering client value.”

Inspiring growth

When platforms connect, they deliver greater capabilities - but also illuminate opportunities. Arun reflects on how incorporating helpful integrations, which make everyday operations easier, can make big growth moves feel more achievable.

“As our clients, i.e. product sellers scale – and scaling can mean multiple things - across different customer segments, across geographies, across product categories, there is a need to accommodate more efficient payment processes.”

Arun Kumar

Global Director of Technology and Strategic Partnerships, Cin7

“Airwallex supports a lot more currencies and gives a global reach. It's going to seamlessly help them scale and, even if they did not have active plans to scale, they now have the incentive to think about it.”

“This gives us the opportunity as partners to better serve our customers and their growth plans and secondly, gives us in turn the opportunity to benefit from that growth.”

Disclaimer: The information contained herein is factual information only and is not intended to imply any recommendation or opinion about a financial product.