In a market saturated with fintech jargon, Airwallex is pushing forward with something refreshingly rare: clarity.

At Money20/20 Europe, Ciaran O’Malley, who now leads the firm’s enterprise business in the UK, offered a grounded and incisive look at how the company is expanding its global reach not through hype cycles or trend-chasing, but through infrastructure that actually works.

Known for its dominance among startups and SMEs, Airwallex’s enterprise ambitions have largely remained in the shadows. That’s changing. O’Malley’s mandate is to take Airwallex’s robust stack multi-currency wallets, embedded finance APIs, virtual cards, and local collection capabilities and reintroduce it to large enterprises who’ve long resigned themselves to legacy constraints.

“We’re not just solving for a new segment. We’re unlearning how enterprise payments were ‘supposed’ to work,” he noted.

It’s a clear shift in posture: from fast-following SME adoption to reshaping how global businesses structure treasury and payments from the ground up.

O’Malley cuts through the noise around embedded finance with a crisp framing: “It’s not about labels. It’s about whether the financial element disappears into the experience.”

For Airwallex, that means enabling clients to:

This is embedded finance not as a PR term, but as a utility layer that lets finance operate at software speed.

O’Malley, who spent eight years shaping open banking standards, is candid about its strengths and its limits.

In markets like the Nordics and Baltics, it captures 70%+ share of wallet. In the UK, it delivers cost efficiency and performance that rivals cards. But he’s also pragmatic: “There is no one payment method to rule them all. You need the right method, at the right time, for the right use case.”

Airwallex’s model reflects that belief, offering everything from card acceptance to local LPMs to open banking rails all under one gateway, minus the dogma.

The core of Airwallex’s value for enterprises lies in its ability to make global banking feel like SaaS.

Instead of onboarding with a local bank in Singapore or the US, clients get virtual accounts and local payout rails all from one partner. The firm holds licenses across key jurisdictions and prioritizes regulatory clarity over arbitrage.

This licensing-first approach isn’t limiting it’s differentiating. “Enterprise clients don’t want shortcuts. They want assurance,” O’Malley noted.

Where others draw ideological lines between traditional banking and blockchain, Airwallex sees room for both. Stablecoins, O’Malley admits, solve real problems but not all of them. And sometimes, traditional liquidity models with strong licensing offer a safer, faster, and cheaper route.

He summarizes it best: “There’s a better world in between. That’s what we’re building.”

While generative AI steals headlines, O’Malley is more intrigued by agentic commerce delegated decisions within embedded systems.

Imagine a travel platform that automatically purchases event tickets based on user preferences and price thresholds. Today, that’s constrained by card networks and authentication flows. But embedded finance, backed by Airwallex’s programmable infrastructure, could make that vision real. “If AI enables agents to decide, embedded finance lets them act. That’s the missing link.”

Perhaps the most honest takeaway came late in the conversation:
Airwallex ships so fast, the commercial challenge isn’t market education it’s keeping pace with what’s already been built.

That pace, married with a strong compliance backbone and API-first DNA, is what’s quietly turning Airwallex into a serious player in enterprise fintech.

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