Bird selects Airwallex to power its global financial infrastructure

Introducing Bird

Bird (formerly MessageBird) powers communication between businesses and their customers. It does this across any channel, always with the right context, in every corner of the world. If you’ve ever ordered takeaways, returned a package, contacted customer service, or requested a login code, you’ve probably interacted with Bird technology. 

Bird is used by leading technology companies to process over 5 trillion messages, calls, and emails for 29,000 customers worldwide, including Google, Facebook, and Uber.

Challenge

Today, the platform processes hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The company is growing rapidly, creating a whole new challenge for its financial operations.

Bird’s financial infrastructure was fragmented across more than 10 entities and currencies, and supported by different regional banking partners. This setup resulted in inefficient processes and costly transactions. On top of that, Bird's banking parters couldn't accommodate or adequately support integration with its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, NetSuite, which was central to Bird's operations.

This setup left the finance team with a heavy manual workload and limited visibility of the company’s global financial operations.

“As we scaled the product and expanded to new territories, we quickly found our financial operations becoming fragmented, inefficient, and limiting our ability to move quickly. The finance team was also having to manage an ever-growing AP and AR function with significant manual overhead. We needed to find a global payments partner that could offer all the services and coverage of our existing banking infrastructure combined. They needed to have great APIs and strong technical capabilities. Airwallex was the perfect match,” says Robert Vis, Founder and CEO at Bird.

Solutions

Bird has consolidated all of its financial infrastructure using our platform, providing full visibility into payments across multi-entity accounts. For example, it uses Airwallex virtual cards as well as our extensive global coverage to streamline payments, such as for payroll and supplier payments around the world. The team can then easily reconcile all payments thanks to our platform's integration with NetSuite.

How it works

Account infrastructure

Using the Airwallex Global Treasury and Payments Network (GTPN), Bird can instantly create accounts with local bank details, in multiple currencies, in each market it operates​ in. From one dashboard, the finance team can access a real-time group view of all accounts, and convert funds at interbank FX rates.

Payouts & FX

Bird pays hundreds of suppliers regularly. It uses Airwallex’s multi-level approvals feature to control spend in a time-efficient way. It can also instantly issue virtual and physical cards to create easily-reconcilable supplier payments.  

NetSuite integration

While all Airwallex customers can integrate with NetSuite, we worked closely with Bird to customise its integration for even faster reconciliation.

Card issuing

Bird is using Airwallex’s virtual card issuing product to pay global suppliers and marketing spend with greater control and tracking.

Payroll

Bird uses Airwallex’s batch transfers feature to process its own payroll across entities, simplifying the process without requiring an additional provider.

Results

Speed, agility, and enhanced partner support

As an API-first platform, Airwallex worked with Bird’s tech teams on key projects to further optimise performance. Unlike its previous traditional banking partners, Bird has a dedicated account management team at Airwallex which advocates for a long-term strategic partnership.

Finance team efficiency, control, and visibility

Critically, Bird has future-proofed its finance team with a more efficient and automated way to match AP and AR. Approvals, group account view, and control functions have also given Bird end-to-end visibility of the company’s finances, and greater confidence in its spend controls.

Robert Vis

Founder and CEO at Bird

“Airwallex is a fantastic partner for us and we’re excited to see how this partnership develops. They understand the needs of a global SaaS platform and have gone out of their way to work with us to improve how we use their services. They’re not just a great alternative to traditional banking infrastructure, but a level up. Empowered by Airwallex, our Finance team can focus on what they do best, which is optimising operations and growing the business efficiently.”