Hey You and Drive Yello accelerate savings and efficiencies with Airwallex

Drive Yello is a last mile delivery platform that was founded from the necessity to enable QSR businesses to effectively engage with delivery staff. During the Covid lockdowns demand increased rapidly, and their growth trajectory has continued to rise ever since. In 2023, the company merged with order-ahead app Hey You, an essential part of the morning and lunchtime routines of thousands of Aussies.

When Calum Fraser joined Drive Yello as Head of Finance, he was happy to learn they were already using Airwallex, as he had previously introduced the platform at several other businesses.

A history of success with Airwallex

Calum began using Airwallex five years ago at a previous workplace, after learning about the platform through a finance community. 

“The biggest pain point was that we were using a big four credit card for all our overseas subscriptions and things like Amazon Web Services,” he says. “We were probably racking up anywhere between two to three grand a month in fees. So the initial reason for moving to Airwallex was purely from a cost saving perspective.”

“We were using OFX before I found Airwallex, which was pretty clunky and not very easy to actually use day-by-day. So it was more of a necessity at the time where we were looking for an option and Airwallex was one that I heard about.”

Calum Fraser

Head of Finance, Drive Yello

Within a month of having it we were already saving and had transitioned approximately 75% of our international spend onto it. I think that's always been the bedrock of Airwallex and that is I have brought it onto multiple businesses.

Prior to Calum’s arrival, Drive Yello were already using Airwallex, to help manage finance operations between their business units across the world. 

“It was just a really easy way of giving salespeople access to spend money without having to open up fully fledged accounts with banks, which is really difficult to do cross border.”

International money management made easy

Drive Yello and Hey You both use Airwallex’s sophisticated global financial infrastructure for easy and cost effective international spending. 

“That's probably the bedrock of how we use it and what we use it for,” says Calum.

“We oversee spending and international payments and also issue cards to employees so they are able to make work related purchases without having to spend their own money and without having to open credit cards.”

Empowering team members through Borderless Cards

Airwallex Cards help Calum’s team spend flexibly and report accurately, whilst also saving them thousands of dollars in fees. With cards that can be rapidly issued and easily tracked, the Drive Yello finance team have given one to every internal team in the business. 

“We're able to manage our cards so that we can have one card for our marketing expenses, one card for our G&A, one card for our product team. With everybody, you can set the limits.”

Having this transparency has also allowed them to easily keep track of outgoings, and quickly identify subscriptions that are no longer in use. 

Calum Fraser

Head of Finance, Drive Yello

It allows me to sleep easier. You always have software subscriptions that are out in the wild and you can actually see who's card they’re on. You can ask them if they’re still using it, and easily stop them as well, which you can't do if everything's just on one credit card.

Forget chasing receipts for days or dealing with endless admin at reconciliation time, Airwallex Cards can help you streamline processes to save hours.

“It definitely saves us time chasing receipts. Everybody knows what's going through their own card, therefore it's very easy to send a message and say that we haven't received their receipts. It is a much simpler process.” 

New products, new opportunities

After such a successful few years of using Airwallex, Calum says that he now checks in with his account manager Pete Waldron whenever they’re looking to expand different areas of the business.

Calum Fraser

Head of Finance, Drive Yello

Whenever we launch new things, we always look to Airwallex to see whether that's something that they can offer. As an example, in the Payment Link space, we were using Stripe for payment links and then we moved onto Airwallex because it was a cleaner process.

“I find the user interface is much more suited to the people who use it - which is mostly finance people at our place.” 

Batch Transfers was also a helpful feature that Drive Yello picked up as they grew. The helpful tool can help businesses make up to 1,000 payments at once, in different currencies. Drive Yello uses it to pay overseas contractors. 

“We are looking to do more of this, but looking for  the expense piece, such as the personal expense reimbursement platform,” says Calum.

“I worked with Airwallex 4 years ago when they were bringing on a new product every few months and one of them was the expense management piece, which we are now looking at implementing for Drive Yello.” 

Feedback in action

It’s true that Airwallex is always launching new products to make our suite even more powerful, and these developments are always inspired and fuelled by customer feedback. 

Our support team and account managers like Pete are all ears when it comes to collaborating, and as an agile team – they can easily pass on notes to engineers who have their hands directly on the platform. 

Calum Fraser

Head of Finance, Drive Yello

Another thing that I really like about Airwallex is the personalised engagement they offer and we always have access to a person. It is a much nicer feeling when you can work through solutions together, and it saves you time.

“I think it's very much a collaborative approach. You can raise a question and say, are you able to do this or we're having these frustrations, and Pete will flag it with an engineer and they will see if there is a better way of doing things.”

“It is vastly different from the other payment gateways and platforms that we've used in the past.”

It all starts with a conversation

If you’re curious about how Airwallex could help your business, Calum suggests reaching out to our friendly customer success team. You never know what transformative solutions you might discover within our versatile product suite. 

“I think just have a conversation with Airwallex because there are so many things that the tool and platform can do.”

“They offer a great personalised experience work with you to find solutions  to make things easier. They are always open to having conversations, and if something is not offered  it is probably only 6 months down the line.”

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