Many merchants have long eyed international expansion, only to be daunted by its complexity. That’s the challenge Airwallex is targeting with the launch of its in-store point-of-sale system.
The Australia-based fintech is attempting to stand out in a crowded market by offering a physical solution that allows businesses to accept in-person payments across multiple countries through a single platform—eliminating the need to partner with local vendors in each market.
These brick-and-mortar transactions integrate with online payments within Airwallex’s broader platform, which also includes reporting tools and back-office functionality.
“This is super interesting and brings me back to how I look at the merchant side of payments—processing moves data, acquiring moves money,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Many innovative fintechs have a laser focus on maximizing network performance and optimizing integrated payment workflows, while losing sight of the fact that the data represents real money that merchants need to run their businesses.”
The Operational Bottleneck
When expanding into a new market, merchants typically need to onboard a local acquirer, navigate regulatory nuances, and manage a web of domestic vendor relationships.
These operational hurdles have been often been a dealbreaker. Even among millennial and Gen Z business owners—who tend to show a greater appetite for international growth—the time and cost demands of the traditional cross-border model can make expansion feel like a bridge too far.
Infrastructure as Strategy
Airwallex is betting on its infrastructure as the differentiator. The company holds nearly 90 regulatory licenses across roughly 50 markets, maintains direct connections to local payment networks in more than 100 countries, and offers currency conversion capabilities.
This setup allows funds to be held, converted, and redeployed within local markets—where many competing systems still require immediate payouts to merchants’ accounts. If Airwallex can carve out a niche in the market, it will likely owe more to the strength of the global infrastructure than to the point-of-sale system hardware itself.
“The global POS platform that Airwallex has built is the kind of tech innovation that grabs headlines, but the real power of what they’ve built is the network of global banking licenses,” Apgar said. “Banking is regulated in every country, and while it lacks the sizzle of new tech, collecting money from customers is what merchants care about.”
