Airwallex, an Australia-based global payments infrastructure company, has announced the launch of a point-of-sale product that allows businesses to accept in-person payments across multiple countries through a single platform.
The move extends its existing cross-border infrastructure into physical commerce and positions the company in direct competition with Square and Adyen in the in-person payments market, while deepening its rivalry with Stripe across the broader payments stack.
The POS product connects in-store and online payments within a unified platform, offering consolidated reporting and direct integrations into back-office systems. Businesses operating across multiple countries can run stores on the same payment infrastructure and reconcile transactions in one place, without establishing separate local vendor relationships or navigating fragmented compliance requirements in each market.
Infrastructure differentiation and competitive positioning
Airwallex was founded in 2015 and has spent the past decade building its own underlying payment rails, accumulating close to 90 regulatory licences across approximately 50 markets, direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries, and the ability to settle transactions in more than 90 currencies. The company states it processes USD 100 billion in annual volume and generates approximately USD 1.3 billion in annualised revenue, growing at approximately 85% per year. It currently serves more than 46,000 US businesses and is valued at USD 8 billion by its investors.
A key differentiator the company highlights is the ability to hold funds within a local market rather than immediately repatriating them, a capability enabled by its local banking licences. Airwallex's Japan licence, which took seven years to secure, is cited as an example of infrastructure that allows funds to be held, converted, and deployed domestically rather than paid out immediately to merchant bank accounts.
Adyen is identified as Airwallex's most direct competitor in global in-person payments infrastructure, while Fiserv and the combined Global Payments and Worldpay command significant legacy market share among traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
Commenting on the news, Jack Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Airwallex, noted that the typical multi-market expansion requires onboarding a new local acquirer and managing additional vendor relationships in each country, and that Airwallex's single-platform approach addresses that complexity directly.
