How SleekFlow saves 99% in bank fees on their international transfers
Learn how SleekFlow uses Airwallex to create corporate Visa cards for its employees and avoid high bank fees when transferring money overseas.
SleekFlow powers the future of e-commerce, featuring an omnichannel social commerce software. From conversations to conversions, SleekFlow enables full customer journeys across SMS, live chat, popular social and messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, or whatever customers prefer.
Company size
50 - 100 employees
Location
Hong Kong, Singapore
Industry
Retail
What does the future of eCommerce look like? For Henson Tsai, the founder and CEO of SleekFlow, it’s all about blending social media and social messaging with the online customer experience. In 2019, Henson launched SleekFlow, an omnichannel social commerce platform, to empower global businesses to carry out full conversational journeys with their customers across SMS, live chat on websites, and popular social and messaging applications.
Save over 99% in fees when transferring money overseas
Headquartered in Hong Kong, SleekFlow runs offices in Singapore and the UK, and works closely with remote engineers from around the world.
Managing a global workforce, Henson has to process SleekFlow’s payroll duties in multiple currencies, a task that is extremely time-consuming and prone to errors. Depending on where his employees and remote contractors are based, he has to set up the payroll according to their country’s local currency. Before using Airwallex, Henson also faced high TT charges and expensive exchange rates when transferring money overseas through traditional banks, adding up to high costs for his international transfers.
Using Airwallex’s FX and international payment services, Henson is able to pay his global employees directly in local currencies within the same day via local routes, avoiding the high TT charges while enjoying market-beating exchange rates. Unlike many major banks, Airwallex does not charge a batch payment processing fee on international money transfers. This allows Henson to upload all of his payment requests in one go, saving him time and money.
Henson Tsai
Founder and CEO
“By using Airwallex to pay our salaries expense, we are able to save more than 99% in transfer fees. We no longer have to go through SWIFT and it’s as easy as making a local transfer. Also, we can arrange quick batch payments with a $0 fee processing fee – in fact, there are no hidden charges when using Airwallex at all!”
Avoid FX charges with a multi-currency global account
Not only are SleekFlow’s employees located around the world, they also have a global customer base. To streamline their payment process, the SaaS company uses a global payment gateway. This allows their global customers to pay for the subscription services online using their local currencies, such as Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Malaysian Ringgit, and British pound.
However, there is one major drawback. While the payment gateway accepts payments in multiple currencies, it converts everything back to Hong Kong Dollar before transferring the funds into SleekFlow local bank account. For each customer transaction, the payment gateway then charges SleekFlow a fee of up to 2.5-3% on exchange rates and additional settlement fees, hindering the company from gaining their full profits.
To avoid the unnecessary FX charges, SleekFlow switched over to Airwallex’s global business account. Using Airwallex’s foreign currency account, SleekFlow can easily open local bank accounts wherever their customers are located, allowing them to receive customer payments directly in their local accounts with no added fees.
Streamline employee expense reimbursement with employee Visa cards
In their day-to-day operations, SleekFlow’s employees often need to make various company purchases, ranging from SaaS subscriptions in USD to business lunches at local restaurants. Previously, their employees had to use their personal credit cards for these company payments and go through a tedious expense approval and claims process to get reimbursed for their money. Using Airwallex, Henson can easily create employee Visa cards online for his employees, so they can directly use their Airwallex business cards for all company expenses, eliminating the lengthy reimbursement process.
Henson Tsai
Founder and CEO
“Airwallex is also compatible with our accounting system Xero, so we can streamline our entire claims and payment process and minimise the chances of making mistakes.”
SleekFlow’s key to success
Since it was founded in 2019, SleekFlow has acquired over 4,000 global customers, processing over 20 million messages for them each month. To keep pace with the ever-changing eCommerce digital landscape, Henson encourages entrepreneurs and start-up founders to be adaptable to the shifting consumer demands and move fast to these changes.
Get started with us today to streamline your global business payments! If you have any questions, please feel free to book a demo with our product specialists.
See how our customers are finding Airwallex
"Airwallex has been a game changer for all our banking needs. As a fast-growing startup, we need a scalable yet cost-efficient batch payment solution to pay our employees and vendors both inside and outside Hong Kong. Airwallex helps us save money on every bank transfer with their near-zero transaction fee and market-beating FX rates. We also use Airwallex’s multi-currency Visa cards for business travel expenses and SaaS subscriptions to avoid hidden bank fees that would otherwise have been difficult to spot. Would highly recommend other startups to get started with Airwallex!"
Henson Tsai
Founder, SleekFlow
"Importing the best wine and sake overseas always involve extra costs on transaction fee & FX fee. With Airwallex, we saved 100% of our overseas remittance cost and we could provide the best price for our customers."
Tomy Wu
Co-Founder, MyiCellar
"Airwallex is an innovative fintech platform with a first-class customer support team. They transformed the previously painful process of creating corporate cards and managing business accounts into something simple, convenient, and cost-effective. The onboarding was quick and smooth, the security features exceeded our expectations, and most importantly, it is really easy to use. Airwallex saves a lot of my team's time and the simplicity is genius."
Gavin Black
Interim CEO & Chief Financial Officer, PURE Group
"I’m so thankful that Airwallex exists! In Hong Kong, it's so hard to find financial service providers that are friendly to small businesses. Airwallex allows me to exchange currencies at really great rates, and the interface is very modern and easy to use compared to my bank. We save so much money with Airwallex! In just a few months, we've already saved more than HK$78,000 in unnecessary fees!"
Jennifer Chong
CEO, Linjer
"Airwallex provides us with flexibility and cost savings on our international fund flows. We are using Airwallex to pay international suppliers and are saving up to 90% on transaction fees and FX verses traditional banks - thanks to their competitive exchange rate and low transaction costs."
Kelvin Kan
Founder, Homemakase
"Airwallex has been great for our team - it makes payments and transfers so much easier, and has saved us significant amounts of time compared to what we were doing before with HSBC. Airwallex's platform is easy to use and very intuitive. Airwallex virtual card has solved most of our painpoints with sharing corporate card numbers and credit card limits. The best part is being able to save money on all our monthly bank transfers, and we've already saved thousands of dollars by using Airwallex. Airwallex's support has also been highly responsive to troubleshoot any issues in a timely manner."
Sarah Chang
Co-founder & COO, Forkast.News
"Airwallex offers both physical and virtual corporate cards tailored to the needs of different staff. Their virtual corporate card can even be set up in just 1 minute. Its features make expense management and approval processes notably easier for us."
Justin Chu
General Manager, K Dollar Program
"With Airwallex, we were able to start accepting local payments quickly. Because the user experience is intuitive and the checkout process faster, we’ve actually had a 50% increase in shoppers using local payment methods."
Rebekah
Business Development Director, Slowood
