Gilding Growth: How the Gild Group supports their clients growth with Airwallex

Gilding Growth: How the Gild Group supports their clients growth with Airwallex

The Gild Group is one of Australia’s fastest growing multidisciplinary professional services firms. With a comprehensive suite of services across wealth, accounting, finance, legal, insurance, venture capital and marketing, the firm is passionate about creating positive impact for their clients and helping them build successful businesses.

Priding themselves on being client-centric, innovative, and always ready to celebrate success, we chatted with Amit Shah, Director at The Gild Group, about the successes the firm and their clients have achieved since partnering with Airwallex.

Facing challenges before Airwallex

Starting with a team of 10 in Melbourne, The Gild Group has grown to more than 160 people across Australia, and globally over the last 5 years. They work with what would typically be considered ‘complex’ clients, such as start-ups, musicians, hospitality venues and construction businesses. 

Before using Airwallex, The Gild Group and their clients were mostly using traditional banks, “which weren’t too flexible”, admits Amit. 

“The platforms our clients were using did some things, but not all of them. They’d be using TransferWise to transfer money, and then something else for expenses. There were big gaps in each platform’s offering.”

Transforming challenges into solutions: the Airwallex impact

Airwallex Global Accounts are domestic and foreign currency accounts that can be opened from anywhere in the world within minutes. They’ve given The Gild Group and their clients the opportunity to receive payments in any currency and hold those funds in dedicated currency accounts, meaning they can say goodbye to costly conversion and transaction fees. 

Amit Shah

Director

“The idea of it being really easy to open an account from anywhere in the world has been a catalyst for our clients when it comes to choosing Airwallex.”

“Previously, they’ve had to get multiple shareholders and directors in a physical banking branch to go through multiple security processes, which are still one of those archaic things we see in banking. But now, it can be done in minutes.”

Virtual cards simplify global business

Airwallex’s Borderless Cards allow employees to make purchases in multiple currencies from held funds in Airwallex Global Accounts. They can be set up in minutes and issued anywhere in the world, as well as giving The Gild Group and their clients the ability to stay in full control of employee spending from a single dashboard. 

“The way we use Airwallex, as well as being an operational expense account, is by giving budgets to people and then issuing Airwallex Borderless Cards to them, which negates our expenses process,” says Amit. 

“There was definitely a pain point to be solved in terms of needing to go through getting authorisation for purchases, versus now being able to just easily monitor employee spending over the course of a month.”

Saving money on foreign transactions

The Gild Group has seen the biggest uptake and greatest appreciation for Airwallex from their clients in the savings it provides on foreign exchange and transaction fees. 

“The predominant use of Airwallex by our clients is through currency transactions,” says Amit. 

“The ability to move funds between internal entities with Airwallex and not have to wait three days for the funds to clear, and not get stung with really bad rates, has been pretty phenomenal.”

“For musicians, they often have to collect money in multiple currencies on tours and then pay taxes in many different countries. Having the ability to use a specific Airwallex Borderless Card in a specific country to make sure they’re only spending that currency has been really beneficial for them.”

Seamless integration with Xero

Airwallex seamlessly integrates with popular ecommerce, marketing and accounting platforms like Xero, Hubspot, Shopify, Netsuite and Amazon - so The Gild Group and their clients can spend less time on their manual operations and more time growing their businesses. 

“We do bookkeeping for many of our clients, and Airwallex’s easy integration with Xero is super helpful for this,” says Amit.

“Whereas before we were having to import transactions and get exports from PayPal, we now have an operating account in Xero that scrapes in transactions every day. Having up to date accounts is so helpful.”

A successful partnership with Airwallex

Amit has only positive things to say about The Gild Group’s experience partnering with Airwallex, joining Airwallex’s Partner Program in 2021.

“Henry Broad, our Account Manager at Airwallex, goes above and beyond in regards to solving our queries and sharing his knowledge with us. It’s been such a good thing for us as a business and our clients.”

“When you’re with a traditional bank, you often don’t have anyone you can call when things go wrong and account management can be difficult.”

Amit Shah

Director

“Partnering with Airwallex, we’ve always felt we have someone to talk to. There’s a certain peace of mind knowing that there are people there to help us because of the relationship we have with Airwallex.”

Amit’s advice for businesses

Amit suggests that in order to function optimally, businesses should review their financial processes periodically to figure out what they could be doing better.

“Think about what you’re doing and what your pain points are. Your tech stack, processes and structure can be easy wins when it comes to improving how you operate as a business. Especially when it comes to how you move money internationally and how you do your expenses.”

“Between onboarding, controls around user access, foreign exchange savings and increasing transfer speed - Airwallex proved to be a solution that works for us.”