Global Payments Have Moved From Feature to Infrastructure

For years, cross-border payments were treated as an add-on. A necessary capability, but rarely a strategic focus. Businesses accepted high FX costs, slow settlement, fragmented visibility, and complex banking relationships as unavoidable friction.

That tolerance has disappeared.

Modern businesses are global by default. Marketplaces, SaaS platforms, and digital-first enterprises operate across countries from day one. Payments, treasury, and FX are no longer back-office concerns  they are core to margins, cash flow, and growth.

McKinsey notes that cross-border payments remain one of the largest and most complex pools of value in global payments, with inefficiencies that infrastructure-led players are uniquely positioned to address. This is the context in which Airwallex’s valuation makes sense.
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Why Investors Are Backing Infrastructure-Led Fintech

The last funding cycle rewarded speed and user acquisition. The current one rewards durability.

Airwallex has positioned itself not as a single-product fintech, but as a multi-layered financial infrastructure platform, combining cross-border payments, FX, treasury, issuing, and APIs into a unified stack.

This matters because infrastructure scales differently from consumer-facing fintech:

• Revenue is usage-driven, not promotion-driven
  
• Switching costs are higher
  
• Customer relationships deepen over time
  
• Margins improve with scale and optimisation
  
  

BCG highlights that infrastructure fintechs serving B2B and platform customers tend to demonstrate stronger long-term unit economics than consumer-focused models once scale is achieved. Airwallex’s Series G suggests investors are prioritising this profile.

Cross-Border Complexity Is the Real Moat

What Airwallex is ultimately selling is not payments alone,  it is complexity management.

Cross-border commerce involves:

• Multiple currencies and FX exposure
  
• Local payment methods and clearing systems
  
• Regulatory and compliance variation
  
• Treasury visibility across jurisdictions
  

Traditional banks solve this through correspondent banking networks that are slow and opaque. Many fintechs solve parts of the problem, but not the whole.

Airwallex’s platform approach, local accounts, multi-currency wallets, programmatic FX, and APIs allows businesses to centralise control while operating globally. This orchestration layer is where long-term value sits. According to McKinsey’s Global Payments research, players that can combine payments, FX, and liquidity management into a single platform are better positioned to capture enterprise and platform customers at scale.

What This Means for Banks and PSPs

Airwallex’s rise puts pressure on both traditional banks and mid-sized payment service providers.

For banks, it highlights a gap. Many still offer cross-border services as fragmented products rather than integrated platforms. Treasury, FX, and payments often sit in separate systems, creating friction for global clients.

For PSPs, the challenge is scale and breadth. Single-rail or region-specific providers will struggle to match platforms that offer global reach with unified APIs and reporting.

This is why we are seeing increased consolidation and partnership activity across payments  providers are racing to assemble full-stack capabilities before customers demand them as a baseline.

Valuation as a Signal, Not a Finish Line

An $8 billion valuation does not mean the work is done. It raises expectations.

Airwallex will now be judged on:

• Expansion into new geographies
  
• Regulatory resilience across markets
  
• Reliability at scale
  
• Ability to deepen enterprise adoption
  

The funding also reflects a broader belief: that global financial infrastructure is still underbuilt. Despite years of fintech innovation, moving money across borders remains slower, costlier, and less transparent than it should be. Platforms that can close this gap sustainably will continue to attract capital, even in cautious markets.

How FT Interprets Airwallex’s Series G

At FT, we see Airwallex’s funding as confirmation of a larger shift: fintech growth is consolidating around infrastructure, not interfaces.

The next phase of fintech will reward companies that:

• Build composable, multi-region payment and treasury stacks
  
• Integrate FX, liquidity, and reporting into unified platforms
  
• Operate comfortably under regulatory scrutiny
  
• Serve businesses, platforms, and banks  not just end users
  
  

For banks and fintechs alike, this raises a strategic question:
Is your payments and treasury architecture built for global scale or patched together country by country?

Preparing for the Next Wave of Global Payments

As cross-border commerce accelerates, infrastructure decisions made today will define competitiveness for years.

Organisations need platforms that are:

• Modular and vendor-agnostic
  
• Capable of supporting multiple rails and currencies
  
• Designed for continuous regulatory and geographic expansion
  

At FT, we help banks, fintechs, and platforms design and modernise global payments and treasury infrastructure with a focus on composability, resilience, and execution.

Book a strategy call to explore how your organisation can prepare its payments stack for the next phase of global growth.