Rodd & Gunn manage corporate spending in style with Airwallex

One of Aotearoa New Zealand’s favourite fashion brands, Rodd & Gunn has been delivering elevated apparel since 1946, and the world has taken notice. 

Although the brand has always been a local favourite, the eCommerce boom of 2020 saw their global popularity skyrocket. Four years later, Rodd & Gunn has 77 brick-and-mortar locations worldwide, as well as huge demand on 21 eCommerce channels, seven wholesale channels, and 183 concession partner locations. 

We spoke with Senior Financial Accountant, Mitch Halstead, about how Airwallex has helped this incredible Kiwi brand take on the world.  

Shaking off clunky traditional processes

With a growing team and global ambitions, Rodd & Gunn were seeking a streamlined and centralised financial operations solution. Traditionally, they used a combination of journaling American Express Statements and record keeping through Expensify and bulk emails, encountering many hurdles in the process.

“We dished out dozens of Amex cards across the business and there's no real succinct way for expense record keeping,” says Mitch. “It was really hard to track receipts as it wasn't a succinct platform.”

Expensify also lacked the robust receipt tracking and reporting mechanisms that Mitch was after. The platform also wasn’t widely adopted by the Rodd & Gunn team, causing inconsistencies in processes.

”Some people adopted Expensify and some people didn’t,” says Mitch. "This led to many people batch emailing receipts at the end of the month - a process which was challenging for the finance team as they endeavoured to track receipts across jurisdictions." 

Mitch Halstead

Senior Financial Accountant

“You’d have to spend so long manually configuring Expensify as the receipts that you just received over email to then produce a report, you couldn’t be confident that it was accurate.”

Amex was causing similar blockers to efficiency. “Receipt retention was at 70%, missing out on 30% of receipts,” causing them to miss out on the GST and VAT portion. Even with both platforms, Rodd & Gunn were still producing inaccurate reporting and losing out on claiming expenses because of it.

With the inflation and rising business costs, Mitch knew it was imperative to fix these issues to avoid further financial losses.  

Redesigning systems with Airwallex

After dramatically reducing the number of transactions being processed through Amex and Expensify, Rodd & Gunn found Airwallex’s Spend Suite. From there, “the sky was the limit.” 

Airwallex Borderless Cards are business debit cards for multi-currency transactions, allowing Rodd & Gunn’s employees to spend efficiently across business entities and manage their card expenses seamlessly. 

Mitch explains, “In the past, with the combination of the Amex statements and Expensify, the missing link was probably the lack of a finance background." 

Mitch Halstead

Senior Financial Accountant

“Airwallex is clearly made for non-finance people... Anyone could get it right.”

With these cards, Airwallex provides end-to-end Expense Management made for simple adoption that is both easy to “communicate to non-finance people” and “still has the finance guys in mind” in the back-end. 

With ‌overwhelming adoption, processes are much smoother across the business. “99% of receipts are captured,” he says. “Receipt retention is through the roof.”

A tailored solution for expense reporting

With customisations available within Airwallex Expense Management tools, Rodd & Gunn were able to dodge the time-wasting manual admin. 

“With the Amex statements, the dates for that were the 16th to the 15th, which was really unhelpful because our month end is usually from the 1st to the 30th. Whereas with Airwallex you can configure it to have a very specific date which you just line up.”

Reports are similarly made-to-fit, which has led to time savings for Mitch’s team at reconciliation time. “It's both a mix of being quite time saving and really accurate information.”

Mitch Halstead

Senior Financial Accountant

“Reports that you can get out of the portal are very tailored to what we would like… You can go fully customised with the expense coding. From an accounting perspective, you could put your entire P&L into Airwallex and the cardholders would code it… From an accounting perspective, life could not be easier.”

Borderless Cards, borderless opportunities

With newfound accuracy, adoption, and efficiency, Rodd & Gunn has begun to empower their employees with cards. Employee corporate cards were once a thing for senior management only, but now Mitch is adding two to five cardholders per week.

Rodd & Gunn’s employees have been more willing to travel across regions given the simplicity of employee reimbursements. Complicated receipt tracking once made people hesitant to travel, but now “it takes 30 seconds after an expense to do it live, there’s no admin piece at all.” 

Mitch Halstead

Senior Financial Accountant

“I think we've just ticked over 50 cards this week… We hope that this completely wipes out the need for employee reimbursements, especially for those that travel.”

Customer support to fit every situation

We’ve heard horror stories from customers about spending hours on the phone to the banks. We know that questions around finance just can’t wait, which is why we champion fast and effective support.

“Support’s been really good,” says Mitch. “Most of the time I’m receiving an email back within 24 hours.” 

In addition to Airwallex’s customer support and account managers for real-time assistance, Airwallex offers an incredible digital library of product information that couldn’t be easier to navigate. “It’s like a Google search for FAQs,” Mitch recalls. “Of the questions I’ve emailed support about, the automatic trigger has answered it 4 out of 5 times.” 

Mitch Halstead

Senior Financial Accountant

“With a lot of other services you'll often send an email to support and they'll be like, ‘please browse our FAQs’... Whereas Airwallex actually sends you articles that have keywords that are linked to your support ticket and it comes back really relevant half the time. Instead of a 24 hour, it's a two minute response.”

From Aotearoa to the world, we’re backing you all the way

Feeling inspired by how Rodd & Gunn have leveraged Airwallex’s tools in their international expansion? If you’re looking for a next-generation solution to support your business’ financial operations, Airwallex could be the perfect solution. Get started by signing up for a Business Account now. 

Disclaimer: The information contained herein is factual information only and is not intended to imply any recommendation or opinion about a financial product. Airwallex was not able to manually test each provider and a reader should consider the specific requirements of their business when evaluating providers.