Bird selects Airwallex to power its global financial infrastructure

Introducing Bird

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

Leading technology companies across many sectors – including Google, Facebook, and Uber – use Bird to process over five trillion+ messages, calls, and emails for 29,000 customers worldwide. 

Challenge

Today, the platform transacts hundreds of millions of USD annually and is growing fast, creating a scaling challenge for its finance team. 

Bird’s financial infrastructure was fragmented across 10+ entities and currencies, and supported by different regional banking partners. This fragmentation created process inefficiencies and unnecessarily costly fund flows. Moreover, central to the efficiency of Bird operations was a sophisticated integration with its ERP system, NetSuite, which its global banking partners could not accommodate or adequately support.

It also left the Finance team with a heavy manual workload and obscured a true picture of the company’s global financial position. 

“As we scaled the product and expanded to new territories, we quickly found our financial operations were 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’d need to have great APIs and strong technical capabilities. Airwallex was the perfect match,” says Robert Vis, Founder and CEO at Bird.

Solutions

Bird uses Airwallex to consolidate its financial infrastructure into one provider to provide end-to-end visibility of multi-entity accounts and its virtual card infrastructure. Bird also uses Airwallex’s extensive global coverage to make single and batch payouts to suppliers around the world and make payroll, which it can reconcile more easily thanks to the purpose-built integration between Airwallex and NetSuite.

How it works

Accounts infrastructure

Using the Airwallex Global Treasury and Payments Network (GTPN), Bird can instantly spin up local accounts in multiple currencies in each of its operating markets. From one dashboard, the finance team can access a real-time group view of all accounts and manage intra-account money movement at optimal spot rates.

Payouts & FX

As part of its product, Bird pays hundreds of suppliers on a regular basis. It uses Airwallex’s multi-level Approvals feature to better control spend in a time-efficient manner. The finance team can also instantly issue virtual and physical cards to create easily reconcilable supplier payments.  

NetSuite integration

While integration to NetSuite (and more) is available as standard for Airwallex customers, Airwallex and Bird worked together on a more sophisticated integration that would provide greater speed and depth of reconciliation with NetSuite. 

Card issuing

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

Payroll

Bird uses Airwallex’s batch transfers functionality to run its own payroll across entities, removing the need for an additional provider and reducing the complexity for the finance team. 

Results

Speed, agility, and enhanced partner support

As an API-first platform, which is also experiencing strong global growth, Airwallex was able to work with Bird’s tech teams on key projects to further optimise performance. Likewise, and unlike their previous traditional banking partner, Bird has a dedicated Account Management team at Airwallex which advocates for the long-term strategic partnership.

Finance team efficiency, control, and visibility

Critically, Bird has futureproofed its finance team with a more efficient and automated way to match AP and AR, saving countless hours and headaches. Approvals, group account view, and control functions have also given the Finance team end-to-end visibility of the company’s finances, and greater confidence into who is spending what and when.

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.”