Airwallex Co-Founder Lucy Liu: How the Fintech Unicorn Rebuilt International Payments (2019 Interview)

A 2019 conversation, published honestly: Airwallex co-founder Lucy Liu explains — in her own words, before the company's global expansion — why cross-border business payments were stuck on 1970s-era SWIFT rails, and how Airwallex built a faster, cheaper alternative by connecting directly into local payment networks.

This interview was recorded in December 2019, when Airwallex had just become a fintech unicorn. It is not current news about Airwallex — it is a primary-source conversation with one of its co-founders about why the company exists and how its payments infrastructure actually works. We are republishing the full show notes and transcript here as the canonical page for this episode.

Who is Lucy Liu

Lucy Yueting Liu is a co-founder of Airwallex, the Hong Kong-based fintech that became a unicorn building cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses. Before co-founding Airwallex, she worked in banking and investment consulting, having moved from mainland China to New Zealand and studied at Melbourne University. At the time of this interview she had been named to Forbes Asia's "30 Under 30."

The founding story: a $700 lesson in cross-border payments

Airwallex began in Melbourne in 2015, when co-founders Jack and Mark ran a café and needed to import coffee cups and paper wraps from China. Transferring roughly $15,000 to China through a bank or Western Union cost them about $700 in fees and FX spread. That friction — slow, expensive, complex cross-border payments running on technology invented in the 1970s — became the founding thesis for Airwallex: build a cheaper, faster, more scalable alternative to SWIFT and traditional bank rails.

How Airwallex bypasses SWIFT

Rather than routing payments through a chain of correspondent banks, Airwallex builds directly into local settlement systems — the same kind of infrastructure as SEPA in Europe or Faster Payments in the UK — in the countries it supports. That direct connection lets Airwallex route a payment from one bank to another without the intermediary banks in between, cutting cost and time out of the transfer.

Handling currencies that aren't freely convertible

Currencies like the Chinese yuan, Indonesian rupiah, Philippine peso, and Vietnamese dong aren't freely convertible outside their home countries, which is a common source of delayed or bounced international payments. Airwallex works with regional banking partners and regulators in those markets so money arrives with full transparency, rather than disappearing for weeks before bouncing back.

What makes Airwallex different from a bank

Liu's description in the interview: banks segment customers — individual, business, corporate, institutional — and each segment gets different products for collection, FX, and payout, handled separately. Airwallex, by contrast, offers the same end-to-end product regardless of customer size: collecting and paying out across dozens of countries, at scale, through one system.

On becoming a unicorn — and the valuation quote

"Valuation is the result of what you did well. It is not really a milestone itself. Valuation means nothing if there is no growth." — Lucy Liu, co-founder, Airwallex

Liu was candid that hitting unicorn status didn't feel transformative in the moment — what mattered was the underlying growth the valuation reflected. She also pointed to a stat from Silicon Valley peers: the average startup CEO stays in the role only three years, because scaling a business requires the founder's own role to keep evolving — from writing code and doing the fundraising personally to managing people and thinking strategically.

Female founders and "work-life integration"

Liu also talked about being a founder and a mother at the same time, pushing back gently on the idea of "work-life balance" in favor of what she called "work-life integration" — not separating the two, but making them work together.

Watch the full 2019 interview

Watch on YouTube: Interview with Lucy Liu, co-founder of Airwallex (2019)

Also available: the 2024 remastered cut of this interview.

More on FinTech in the DACH region

This 2019 Airwallex conversation is one piece of Startuprad.io's broader fintech coverage. For the current state of challenger banks, embedded finance, crypto and CSRD-driven compliance tooling across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, see our FinTech Startups Guide: Germany, Austria & Switzerland.

More from Startuprad.io

This 2019 conversation sits inside Startuprad.io's ongoing coverage of European and international fintech founders. For the full, AI-readable index of our episodes and tools, see the Startuprad.io /llm page.

Startuprad.io reaches founders, operators, and investors across the DACH startup ecosystem and beyond. If your company wants to reach that audience, become a Startuprad.io partner.

About the Host

Joern "Joe" Menninger is the host of the Startuprad.io podcast and covers founders, investors, and policy developments across the DACH startup ecosystem. Through more than 1,300 interviews and nearly a decade of reporting, he documents the evolution of the European startup landscape.Follow Joern on LinkedIn.

Full Transcript (2019 Interview)

This is the complete, lightly cleaned transcript of the original December 2019 conversation between Joe Menninger and Lucy Liu, published verbatim as the canonical record of this episode.

Intro: Welcome to Startuprad.IO, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene. With news, interviews, and live events.

Joe: Hello and welcome everybody, this is Joe from Startuprad.IO your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany. Right now, I do have the great pleasure to have Lucy here with me. She is one of the co-founders of a unicorn based in Asia, and I do have the pleasure to have her here. Because right now by accident she's in my time zone, and she's one of the third of people I like to bring you because they're interesting and they're not from Germany. Because if there's something that's really global, it's financial markets and the startup world and Lucy, you're actively both. Hello, welcome.

Lucy L.: Hi, thank you very much; it's pleasure to speak with you.

Joe: The pleasure is all mine. I've been stalking you a little bit on LinkedIn. So basically, I know you've been in banking; you've been in investment consulting. And what is all the stuff you did before? Because you told me your mainland Chinese and you've entered university in Australia. Can you tell us just a little bit who Lucy is, what she likes to do, and how you ended up in your first few jobs before founding the startup?

Lucy L.: Yes, absolutely. So I was born in the northern part of China, and my family moved to New Zealand when I was in probably middle school, and then I did my university degree at Melbourne University. And after that, yes, I think just being financial services banking for my first few jobs before I co-founded Airwallex. Initially, it was summer internships at Chinese banks, and then I got a trainee program with a bank based in Hong Kong. And then, after that, during my master's degree, I also worked as an investment consultant. But I quickly jumped into the startup world when I was only 25 years old. So fairly young at that time, but I've been enjoying the life since then.

Joe: I see admittedly, and you don't look older than 25, but I'm just the guy. Having noticed you lived in New Zealand, are you a big rugby fan?

Lucy L.: Yes, I am All Blacks all the way.

Joe: For everybody who doesn't know, that's the New Zealand rugby team. For such a small country, they're really good, and they do make this haka at the beginning, and they dress in all black, the national team that's why they're called All Blacks. That is enough detours for now, and let's get a little bit into Airwallex how you started it and where you got the idea from. Can you bring us a little bit on your train of thought towards Airwallex?

Lucy L.: Okay, so basically Airwallex is a payments platform for businesses that want to expand globally. I think to give a bit of background, cross-border payments are slow, expensive, and complex, and this sort of technology was invented in the 1970s. And for the past decade or so, the payment innovation has always been around the consumer. So remittance, peer-to-peer transfers, and not enough on the business side. And our two co-founders Jack and Max back in 2015 experienced it firsthand, because they were running a cafe in Melbourne and they had to import a lot of products such as coffee cups and paper wraps from China, and using the cross-border payment back then was very hard. They were transferring, I think, $15,000 to China, whether via Western Union or a local bank in Australia, and it ended up costing about $700 in fees and FX spread. And that's, I guess, where the initial idea of Airwallex came from, because we wanted to improve the inefficiencies by offering a cheaper, easier and more scalable alternative to Swift payments and also what the banks were offering.

Joe: Oh, let's take a little bit of a detour on capital markets, FX trading and Swift. So basically, Swift is, I would say, an inter-bank messenger system, as you said. It was invented very early on with the simple idea that money could not move between all the banks across the globe. So basically it was one consultancy setting up a messenger system between the banks, and the idea is there are a lot of different message types. And basically, you can tell a lot to another bank via this secure system. But a lot of banks, till the early 2000s, received the message that the money will be coming, and they did not do anything until the money really arrived. So it's a little bit counterintuitive to what the system was originally thought of, but it was the first attempt to do really fast money transfers, because before that it was really slow. Compared to that old system, how are you guys actually working, and how would a client use you, for example, how would a small cafe in Melbourne use your service?

Lucy L.: So put it quite straightforward and transparently: what we do is we build our own local payment networks. If you think about Europe, you have SEPA, and the UK has Faster Payments, and most of the developed countries and developing countries have relatively efficient local payment networks. And the way that works is that we build into these local settlement systems, and connecting directly and tapping into the local networks allows us to become an alternative to what was slow, removing all the intermediary banks in between. So from the front end, the customers don't actually realize how the money arrived from one point to another. But on the back end, instead of going through all of the different banks in between, the money goes from one bank to another directly because we have that direct connection. And we are able to find the most efficient route, because we've built all of this into our algorithm, and all of these things are decided by our system, how money goes from one country to another.

Joe: We also may add, especially in the case of China, but also for other currencies, that currency is not freely convertible; that means you cannot just go out and say I've got five million in euros to pay, just change it into renminbi, and everything will be fine. Can you talk a little bit about that, how you're dealing with that?

Lucy L.: Yes, sure. I think a lot of businesses and individuals don't realize how difficult it is to do foreign exchange until they actually have exposure to that currency. If you think about euro to U.S. dollar, GBP to euros, liquidity is there, and there are no restrictions on the exchange. But when you are trading into countries like China, and also Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, any of those currencies that don't have any offshore liquidity, it means that you can't exchange into that currency outside of that country. And then it becomes very difficult, and a lot of times you don't realize that the money is not being transferred until one or two months later and the banks come back, and the money bounces back. So what we've done is worked with regional banks in those regions, and set up the local relationships with the regulators. And these banks are authorized to exchange into those currencies, and that ensures that the money arrives and there is full support and full transparency along the way.

Joe: Talking about offshore: basically, when you trade U.S. dollars in the U.S., it's called onshore, and everything else is offshore, and in a lot of countries it's very hard to get, for example, the currency of Tanzania somewhere abroad, because it's not very liquid and not many banks have it at hand, so that can be really troublesome to actually get your hands on the currency to be able to pay it. And I'd be interested — you hinted that basically you always have one bank you're working with, and you transfer directly between those banks and they then use the local transfer area. For example, in Europe, there's a Single Euro Payments Area called SEPA, and in between, European banks can transfer money very fast. But if you then go outside to Africa, Asia, South America, North America, it again gets troublesome to do that, right?

Lucy L.: Yes, absolutely. So I think there are two parts to that: one, like you mentioned, the currency itself may be restricted, and it may be very difficult to get hands-on. And another part is that the cross-border system itself is not thought to be as efficient outside a certain region or a certain country. So the way we work is that we actually work with multiple banks, not just one, because you can't bet everything on one partner. Also, certain banks are good at different things, and even global banks like JP Morgan, Citi, Deutsche Bank, don't have the network into every single country. So, as a result, we are in a way forced to work with multiple banks, and some of the banks we've worked with only have a strong presence within one country. For example, in China, we work with ICBC or some of the third-party payment providers, etc. So we replicate that process in most of the countries that we support, but that said, we don't necessarily need a banking partner in every single country. We do support 130 countries, and some of that is actually via Swift, just because the demand is not as high, but because we know exactly the route the money is taking, even via Swift it is quite efficient.

Joe: I see. And my thoughts now are, so basically, what are you guys doing differently than, for example, a bank in Melbourne would do to transfer the money? Could you talk a little bit about that? What makes Airwallex unique?

Lucy L.: So I think what makes Airwallex unique is that we are in a way customized to help the business scale. So whether it's making batch payments across the border, trading different currencies simultaneously, or allowing businesses access to institutional types of financial products. And in a way, banks are very segmented in their services, so when you walk into a bank, or anywhere else, you automatically get labeled — whether you're an individual customer, a business customer, a corporate customer, or an institutional customer. The service that multinational companies get from the bank is very different to what a small business or a cafe gets. And I think at Airwallex we don't really distinguish that — we do have clearer solutions for more technical companies, but the level of support and the access to our product is not different for smaller customers or bigger customers. And I think at the end of the day we're all about doing things at scale. So whether you need to make thousands of transactions at once, or you need to pay to 50 countries at the same time, you're able to do that quite fast and instantaneously through our solutions. And we're all about end-to-end, so we help customers with collecting money in different countries and paying out to different countries. And if you do that with a bank, what they let you do is all of these steps separately — you can't do it all at once. You have one product for collection, one product for FX, and one product for payout. And I think that is not how businesses operate these days, especially internet companies in a digital age — they want to do things at scale, quickly and transparently, and I think that's what makes Airwallex very different.

Joe: I have been smiling while listening to you, because all those different services are usually conducted by different teams within different banks, and they all have their own P&L, and everybody wants to get the most out of it, so it totally makes sense to combine this. Talking a little bit about the startup and your role in it, because you're the co-founder of a unicorn, which is quite special — I'd be interested in hearing a little bit of the story of the startup, the important steps, and I'd be very curious about the moment you realized, oh, I'm a co-founder of a unicorn. What did you feel differently?

Lucy L.: I think going back to the beginning, there were only five of us in a very small room. I always say I admire the first person who joined us, because it's not easy to leave a stable job at a bigger company to join a startup. I wouldn't have done that if I was working regularly and had that opportunity — it would take a lot more time and courage. And I think over time your role as a co-founder evolves and changes. In the early days we basically did everything, from writing the code — well, my co-founder wrote the code — to doing fundraising ourselves, marketing ourselves, finance, legal, everything. And as the team grew, you obviously bring in people with different experience who are experts in the different fields you require, and your role as co-founder then becomes more of a people manager — you become more strategic, you look at things at a larger scale, at a higher level, instead of focusing on the details of operations and execution. And in terms of the label 'unicorn,' I don't think it sounds nice, but I'd say valuation is something that happens as a result of what you did well in the company; it's not really a milestone in itself. Valuation means nothing if there is no growth within the business. Actually, I spent the last few days in Lisbon at Web Summit, and people are always saying 'unicorns' and 'founders of unicorns,' but realistically it didn't really feel very different, the moment we got the money or the moment we didn't. But I think what changes is how you develop as a co-founder of the business itself. Because I always share a very interesting stat that I heard from friends in Silicon Valley — that the average time a CEO of a startup stays as CEO is three years. And a lot of people aren't able to develop themselves in a way that's good for the business in the long term, or grow fast enough with the business. And I think that's something that's very challenging, but also quite interesting, as a co-founder.

Joe: That really sounds like a great journey. Can you tell us a few books, a few inspirations you had to accompany you on your journey there?

Lucy L.: I think as we grew, over the past three years we were able to become more exposed to other founders — founders of unicorns or listed companies, or people who have been there, done that. And a lot of the inspiration and lessons we learned were by simply talking to these people — you build that network of support, you have that commonality between different founders. And I think being able to meet and just discuss, or even message about it, really helps, because then you're not really alone, or you feel stuck, and someone is there to help you. And even now, when I meet founders of smaller startups, I'm always happy to share with them as well, because I know how difficult it is.

Joe: I see. Just one more goofball question at the end of our very interesting interview: if you could describe your life either as a movie title, a book title, or a combination of both, what would it be and why?

Lucy L.: The funny thing is that when people watch The Intern, the American comedy with Anne Hathaway, they always think of me, because I'm a female founder and I have a daughter now, and people joke about it — I'm kind of a workaholic and I have a husband and children at the same time. But it's interesting to see that it's not just me, it's actually quite a stereotype for female founders. I don't tend to put a gender label on founders, because I feel like whether you're male or female, people are people, and it shouldn't really make a difference. But it does kind of make a difference as a mom now that I have a daughter. So that was very interesting, and I enjoyed the movie a lot, and yes, people look at me and I think of that as well.

Joe: Admittedly, I became a dad just a few months ago, and every time I see my small boy, it kind of helps me abstract away and forget the rest of the world and just be with him in the moment. And that happens quite a lot, because it's like a very small vacation.

Lucy L.: Yes, exactly. I think people talk about work/life balance a little bit too much, and there's a new phrase now called work-life integration. And it feels very much like that for me, because I don't really tend to distinguish between work and life. But you find a way to make it work, and it's always so enjoyable being a founder and being a mom. I always joke about my daughter being my second startup, and my startup being my first grown child as well, and it does feel like that sometimes. So it's very interesting and exciting at the same time.

Joe: Well, very interesting insights. The only thing left for me to say is thank you very much, and I hope to see you again sometime.

Lucy L.: Yes, thank you very much.

Outro: That's all, folks. Find more news, streams, events, and interviews at www.Startuprad.IO; remember sharing is caring.

© Startuprad.io