Employee reimbursements
This guide is intended for employee reimbursements, finance and HR platforms aiming to integrate global employee reimbursement payouts into their existing products. It outlines the benefits of Airwallex's solutions and provides guidance on how to implement without requiring in-depth expertise in the domain.
Through Airwallex Global Treasury solutions, platforms can automate and streamline the end-to-end employee reimbursement payout process and provide a seamless experience globally for their customers, natively within their product.
Overview
A typical reimbursements platform handles various tasks such as employee expense requests and receipt submission workflows. While some platforms may have introduced reimbursement payouts in one or more currencies, global reimbursement payouts often require customers to manage transactions outside the platform, through their external bank accounts. This can lead to challenges in processing reimbursement payouts on an international scale. Issues include time loss and risks of errors in the reimbursement payouts for out-of-pocket expenses, as well as customers having to run complex internal transfers when they want to fund reimbursements from local entities of the employee.
Our Global Treasury solution addresses these challenges by automating funding via direct debit from the local entity bank accounts of customers, as well as fast & cost effective reimbursement payouts over local rails. Airwallex's extensive network of local clearing systems enables reimbursement platforms to support cross-border payouts to employees in multiple countries and currencies, eliminating the need to send costly and slow payouts over conventional cross-border transfer channels such as SWIFT. Surprise wire fees from intermediary banks are avoided and employees are guaranteed to get the full amounts that they had claimed from their employers.
Integration models
Airwallex's employee reimbursements solution supports two integration models:
- Reimbursement payouts funded by the platform
- Reimbursement payouts funded by the platform's customers
In the model where platform's customers fund reimbursement payouts, customers are onboarded to Airwallex as connected accounts with Wallets in their own name to hold funds. For more information on connected accounts, see Connected accounts overview.
Choose your integration model
The choice of integration model will typically depend on the following factors:
- Platform offering: How a platform has structured the reimbursement services they are offering to their customers, for example, a platform fronting the payouts and invoicing their customers for repayments at the end of the month.
- Jurisdiction-specific legal nuances: Different jurisdictions have different regulations regarding fund ownership, platform's ability to process reimbursement on behalf of customers, etc.
Our team will work with you to further analyze both factors and identify the suitable integration model. Note that platforms can potentially choose one or more integration models.
| Reimbursement payouts funded by the platform | Reimbursement payouts funded by the platform's customers | |
|---|---|---|
| Suited for | Platforms fronting reimbursement payouts and invoicing their customers for repayments (e.g., at month end); platforms holding licenses in the jurisdictions they want to launch | Platforms that are out of the funds flow, with reimbursements funded directly by customers |
| Customer onboarding to Airwallex | Optional | Required (customers are onboarded to Airwallex with dedicated connected accounts) |
| Account where funds are collected | Platform's Wallet (without connected account) | Customer's connected account Wallet |
| Is the platform in funds flow? | Yes | No |
| Payouts initiated from | Platform's Wallet | Customer's connected account Wallet |
Airwallex can help you fast track your implementation by providing the necessary infrastructure and tooling support for secure money movement. For more information, see Enabling infrastructure and tooling.