Why He Turned Down $1.2 Billion from Stripe to Build Airwallex (CEO & Founder Jack Zhang)

So let's back up 2019, Airboxes, a little over three years old at this point. You're doing a couple million in revenue, and you end up doing a bunch of meetings with Patrick Collison at Stripe in China, Melbourne, Singapore, San Francisco. And at the end of that, you get an offer for $1.2 billion. But you turn it down. So why and what was kind of the current state of the business and your thinking at the time? I think was really early in our journey. We only been around for three years. And the business really just been scaling for less than 12 months. And we went from nothing to a little over a billion dollar volume within 12 months time. And the business is growing really fast. Haven't really been able to enjoy the startup founder journey yet. That's probably one thing. And I think the other thing is what we found-- that Stripe is very much of a payment that business. And Airboxes at that time were really focused on global money. But it's moving to global business bank. And we already have more losses that's strived at that point, and are going to get even further on the banking side. And we sort of feel it's surprising to do, just keep that independent business to continue to build towards our vision. To build a future global banking to help modern businesses expand globally and open in the business with efficiency at that speed and save them costs. And I feel just too early in our journey to make a sell decision. And I'd rather continue to build towards our vision at a time. And what was that thing that drove the growth from $0 to $1 billion in total payment volume in a year? Maybe talk about some of the big customers that helped drive that and the initial unlock. Yeah, we-- when we build a product that we actually had Musk and Tencent, it's a two of the largest customer. And they both promised very big volume. But unfortunately, what's the product on live end of 2017? And we found that the actual volume we're getting is less than 1% of what we actually expecting. So at that point, we really scrambled, try to find the next big customer to help us to grow. And we thought that product market fit in the e-commerce industry essentially marketplaces paying out to vendors, or suppliers, or sellers globally. And we also found product market fit for a lot of tuition payment providers that need to send tuition payment to globally. And that's kind of too big use. It's not like a thick, old big customer per se. But you have to say, I think she in was one of the biggest customers at that time. And then a bunch of tuition providers, tuition-fig providers, are compared to what's the US company called something flyer. That's kind of the industry that we both promised if it was initially. So there's some big waves around fast fashion, around shin, and then also tuition payments, some other things. A lot of fintech founders, they have these large enterprise deals. They spend years chasing. They go really slowly. And then maybe eventually they're lucky taking off. Be curious to hear about that, like the year is 2017 to 2018 and 19 when it wasn't working, what it felt like to be working on those partnerships. I think there's even a Series A term sheet that maybe got pulled at some point in time, like there's a lot going on then. Yeah, we changed the direction of product twice early on in the journey, when we start the company in 2015 to 2017. So initially we were basically trying to find a way to effectively moving money and trading off facts by ourselves, just by building a network of participants. But we just couldn't really find a way to scale that two-sided sort of marketplace. And we never really kind of took that large step product to the market. And the second product we built is really kind of an invoicing product so that sellers can send invoices globally to kind of get paid. And we basically called called some of the investment banks. And we were lucky that one of them in the Corrie Bank out of Australia, that agreed to giving us liquidity from the interbank. Then we built a fixed engine, able to stream in price from Corrie the way we were to basically giving interbank effects prior to the retail cost per. And that's kind of the initial sort of product that we built that we actually got a few hundreds of customers, the SMB, the North Korea, their selling globality. But we just couldn't get enough customers to scale. And we then built the API business to target a larger e-commerce marketplaces and tuition provided to setting payments globally. That's kind of where we really bought the initial part of our market fit. And that's what helped us to raise the theories be and also called acquisition of our future. Yeah. So starting off with 100 plus SMBs in Australia for FX, moving up into large scale marketplaces, but still focused on e-commerce tuition payments. And then talk about the journey you've been on since 2019, because you now gone from FX into business banking accounts and building a whole new set of layers on top of that for spend, expense management, corporate card issuance, that those sorts of products. So it just gives us kind of an overview of where air wallets is. Yeah. So I think if you kind of roughly break down the journey of the air wallets is probably, I would say, three part. The first part is really focused on global money movement, whether it's collecting money, currency conversions, paying out to individuals or businesses globally, and then various sort of APR-driven selling to large enterprises and platforms. That would cause kind of the phase one of the business. And then phase two, really, what we realize is, as an infrastructure provider, you always facing margin compression kind of competitions in certain corridor with the local providers, their scalability issues. It just feels that we always sort of not able to control our own destiny. So then we kind of then enter to the phase two of the two businesses that we basically pivot back again to our original idea of empowering SMBs to grow that business globalist with building application layer on top of our financial infrastructure like global bank accounts, corporate cards, then sort of merge apprais, that we able to acquiring this SMB directly become the west of shop for these SMBs to help them to grow that business globally, to collecting the revenue, to help them to paying the vendors, suppliers, employees, and whatnot, and managing the treasury in the middle. And the phase three, I would say, is to start building the business operating system, which is a bunch of software applications across best management, bill pay, reimbursements, vendor management, procurement. On the revenue side is like a billing, in-law saying, merchant record, inside phase, inside for right. And now we can layer in AR top that. So that I think that's kind of like a phase three of the company, which is building this three vertical integrated financial infrastructure, both business operating systems, that software plus AR. And we kind of on that, phase three right now, not saying that the phase three is gone. Helpful, but it just really build the foundation of the business ends. And that kind of-- we started building the software later from 2019. And I think that proven to be one of the best decisions we made that we could fully leverage in the power AI, just by building a ton of products. Without kind of panic big on that decision, today we wouldn't be able to achieve so. Yes. And I also want to back up all the way. So you have a pretty interesting story about how you started AirWallix in the first place. And you've started a diverse array of businesses. So let's go all the way back to high school and talk about your very first job. And then can talk about some of the other businesses you started preceding AirWallix. Yes. So I started my first business. It's like a student vaccine, corporate exploration, where obviously nobody getting paid. And we essentially want to help the school to raise some money for student activities. But I really wanted to give us some money. And when the merchant restaurant wanted to ask to help them to send some fires around, then we-- to so that they can give us some money. And we thought it's very effective. And because nobody want to take our flyers on the street that we thought, why don't we create some content that-- so that student actually loved to read and that it could be kind of more interesting by inserting these coupons or vouchers or as into the magazine. Because the content we actually created quite interesting is actually been viral in our city. And then we end up able to create a new content. able to, you know, penetrate all the high schools in my city and we were able to onboard like a few thousand merchants and that working with us. So we actually been quite profitable from day one partly because, you know, normally the student getting paid and we're using the school's printer to print out this, this, this makes it so free. But when I made this and income, you know, I think after, after year and a half and before I left the country to work to Melbourne, but that's kind of the first real taste of success in business, although it's not entirely a professional business. Yeah, and I love that story, but I also love the story of the jobs that you worked in high school. So like, why were you working the jobs and what, what were some of those, the lemon factory, I think is an interesting story as well. Yeah, I worked in, you know, as a kitchen hand in the restaurant, I basically watching dishes and clean up oysters and, you know, I work in the volcano station, whatever you want to call basically doing defrying all sort of stuff and around across high school. And then I went to work in lemon factory after I graduated from high school before I went to college and then I did a bartender job, you know, in while I was in the college, normally it's between sort of four to four p.m. to midnight. And I did the work in the petrol station between midnight, a.m. So I can get paid a bit more. More than I wanted to do all this is just that, you know, I lost financial support from my parents, you know, my dad lost his job and, and I had to basically figure out a way to, to leave and my, by myself, and then pay a tuition. You know, I had them choice, but working all these sort of crazy hours and jobs throughout the college. Yeah. And some of your first businesses, I think post college, you had a wine and olive oil training company and also a cafe and Melbourne. Cures you're a little bit about those businesses, but then also how do you go from that to deciding that you want to start something like air wallets? Yeah, I think the first business I started was actually selling fun cases, you know, on eBay and Amazon, then I started, and that business actually doing well. And, and later on that, that business that I partnered with got acquired by the property for, for more than, you know, six figures. And also started, I guess, importing textiles from China, exporting olive oil and red wines from Australia started like a burger business, started coffee business, started architecture firm, and then real estate development business. Can all basically try to figure out what I can do? And then, partly because I really wanted to make money because my financial situation, you know, while I was 16 really burned me and never want to be in that situation again, the other reason just, I wanted to find something I really love to do and it business. And, but I never kind of wanted to reside for my, for my food count job, which is, you know, I engineer that does trading over sums and market making, stopping the investment back. And I keep the job because I love, love coding and I know that one day I wanted to build some sort of business impact that can scale, you know, using, using my skills just to scale the business and that that's kind of the core reason I was doing many things on the side, but I always keep on job and Airwalex was kind of really the opportunity to follow through that doing that product business. We were importing beans from, from Brazil, from Indonesia, and materials from from China, and we were unique banks in West Uden to make international payments that we found. It's sort of extremely expensive and slow of those, using those those, it compared to, look, money around the world and, and we thought, why can we build a brand new infrastructure that from the front out to move money as fast or as the information, which which is effective will, you know, partly what, what Airwalex is today. Yeah, anyone who thinks that all the work in FinTech is done has not tried to move money internationally because it is still quite difficult. I mean, the, in obviously there's a bunch of FinTech in this space, you know, you have wise and you have new and in that kind of infrastructure space and that's kind of where how we go started initially, but we moved away from that kind of infrastructure business pretty much today and, you know, in 2018 or 2019 that's basically 95% our revenue, but today that's like 15% our revenue, which is kind of a very small part of a business style. We really evolved from infrastructure business to a multi-parallel platform that directly facing merchant as a one-stop shop to help pin, you know, the customers with a bunch of, you know, pin apps like commercial acquiring, billing, you know, emails, etc, to help them to receive money around the world, to managing and also managing the spent of those businesses around the world and help with all the treasure match right in the middle. Yeah, one thing people are excited about for international money movement is stablecoins. You've been pretty skeptical as to their utility. What's your current thinking on stablecoins? I think we, we obviously tried to use stablecoin as a sort of weekend liquidity as well as sort of using stablecoin to, you know, moving money in the Zodiacontries. So right now we built proprietary infrastructure in over 130 plus countries and, using our own network and liquidity providers and we probably work with more than 80 banks around the world to giving us liquidity and it's still very hard to find. Our cost on Zodiacontries is about 10 to 15 basis point. Our weekend is about 30 basis point of a buffer that we kind of really use. It's still very hard to find stablecoin liquidity that cheaper than sort of 10 to 15 basis point or 30 basis point of a weekend. Just kind of not really that useful to us. And, you know, as the, you know, the demand or the supply keep growing in it, you know, maybe one day that we'll, we're able to get an on-ramp and off-ramp costs sort of below the cost that we have today, you need the traditional rails. But, but today we still largely rely on our existing infrastructure. Which we kind of moving now $200 billion a year, 95% with our whole rails as, you know, more than 65% is sort of instant or near instant. And we don't really see a big application of using stablecoin to just for money movement yet at this point. And obviously, that kind of a use it you know, from my bridge, but the like, you know, they helping like, SpaceX to collecting money from Africa. And then you have, you know, one side that you have, you know, these exchanges of paying money to the traders in these countries, sending these payments to those global south countries. And you can net it off essentially. But that's not a, that's not a use case that we have, it's very interesting because the added data volume is still quite small, so it's a kind of scale we are today. And I understand what you're saying, you know, you're moving $200 billion a year, you're building infrastructure in 130 countries over the course of nine years, you get liquidity, it costs you 15 bits or less. So stablecoins maybe don't have a lot of utility. Well, the GTN currency costs us like a quarter of a basis point, you know. Yeah, I just, you know, 10-15 basis point is for exotic currencies like Indonesia or, you know, India, you know, this type of corridors, not even, not even for the, for the GTN or GT20 currencies. Yeah, so sub one basis point even for, for liquidity in those currencies. But I'm curious if you look down the road and you say, okay, and is that still going to the case in three years where it's like, okay, stablecoins maybe are only relevant for exotic. So currencies that aren't as actively traded or maybe as the demand builds, it starts to unlock more utility other layers. Like what do you think would have to shift to start to change your perspective? Where are there corners of the market where you think it has more utility, potentially utility in the near term? I think what's interesting is what happened if that stablecoin never ridden to off-frame. And if, you know, whatever the money that instables that actually stays stable, then there's a water acceptance of merchant that wanted to keep the money in stable, then essentially just moving money on the ledger. Right? So, uh, uh, but secured as ledger. So I think that would be a lot more interesting, but, you know, um, good. For that to happen, you need to build a, uh, the internet-native financial ecosystem. Um, and, uh, you know, I think a lot of interesting part on now being built like stablecoin-backed, uh, card, uh, you know, for example, that if the money basically, uh, stay on the internet, you can issue a card to spend on fiat, uh, that never really need to do the off-frame. The ramp off-frame become a settlement process, which is kind of irrelevant from a consumer standpoint. I think you will see more of these use cases start developing first, uh, instead of, uh, you know, just purely useful money, woofer, where, you know, the off-frame is still required. Um, and as you building out the internet-native financial ecosystem, that's, that's gonna be more adoption all stable points and there's a possibility in a longer term like we say three to five years, there'll be a water adoption from a merchant and consumers and that's where the stable point use case is going to be a lot more interesting. Yep. Also, yes, you just shared a tweet about some current stats on the company. Could you share those here too and give us a sense of where air wall access today? Yes, as overall business we're doing pretty well also in terms of annualized revenue we're doing close to 900 billion and we also for about 95% year-year as last month and as of these months now we're processing over 200 billion dollars. So that's kind of the latest stat. I think there's a very few thin tags at this scale still growing at this speed. I think air wall access is definitely one of the fast-scoring thin tag and payments platform will be the world right now. How do you define your market? Like do you like oh man, you know we can grow this fast for another five years than our market stuff that, how do you think about scaling and scoping that and what are the next big on locks? Yeah, so from a cost-earned point of view we're in about 20 markets. Right, so there's about 10-ish market and eight packs and you know another sort of 10-ish market in America is in New York. Most of the market are developed country you know like Australia and New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, UK, France, Germany, Battlelocks and you know Spain, you know, etc. Europe and then Israel and you also got like Canada and US and Mexico and Brazil in America. So out of all these 20 markets we are in and already regulated and launched or product have product market fit. That's about 120 million businesses that are kind of operating globally whether they have customers or as a revenue or suppliers or vendors or they have multiple entities cost-reach it, a kind of operating globally in some way and you know like right now we're making about $6,000 customer you know if we get to a million customers that will show them to achieve six billion in top one and then a million customers less than 100% of the market we're talking about in the markets we already have product market fit, not even counting the new five people out here. So basically even getting less than 100% of the market we are in should be able to support air wallets to build 100 billion dollar buildings. Yeah, yeah there are a lot of global SMBs and as you build this combinatorial explosion of different products you can unlock new in different revenue streams. You also have a great story about how you met your first investor and co-founder, how did that result in you getting a million dollars in your personal bank account even before the company was formed? That's actually interesting. So Rizzo Lucy is the friend of Max which is another co-founder of air wallets he's had a part of design and he also the guy that helped me to open the coffee business and one day I just sort of finished work on Friday evening and I went to C-Max in the coffee shop and I met Lucy the friend of Max and we just sort of talk about a bunch of stuff and Lucy was interested in investing in coffee business. We sort of just keep talking and we went to dinner afterwards and I told her that we are going to resign and start building air wallets and how they're going to evolutionize the kind of post-order payments or global wedding movement in the trees and she's sort of really interested in the idea and asked whether I'm raising money and I said I'm probably going to raise a million dollars and on the spot this is like a few hours after we met the first time and she offered to give me two million dollars for 40% of the company and I kind of shocked but she was pretty adamant and quite serious about it and the next day we went to the same college and went to law school in the library and we talked about it and when we kind of started talking about nine o'clock and we kind of got a deal agreed that she would invest a million dollars for 20% of the company by the midday and the money just war to my bank account on Mondays with three days after after a month or the first time and and obviously I think the personal bank account because you don't even for the company I haven't even I haven't even resigned at that point I was still working that's a bank that's still you know I hadn't registered the company so that obviously gave me a lot of motivation so basically I think I got the money close to midday and I resigned in afternoon and that's that gives us the initial capital to build the the kind of initial part of the air wallets and obviously I really kind of appreciating the trust and the bad that she put on us and and I bought it to be the co-founder of the company to do to build this company together and she become the civil world and kind of leading the the finance and the the back office or the initial few years and now she's leading our PR comes to go winning. Danny founders watching this I invest very early usually first check in but I will not wire money to your personal bank account you do have to have a business incorporated and a business account so that was probably your easiest raise talk to me about maybe your hardest raise. I think there's many rounds are pretty hard and an obviously series A was pretty hard because we can't build a product and it will fail the first time we build the next product which we know got to fail again but we do have from our KFF for a few hundred SMVs in Australia are we able to leverage in the part raise our series A and and Tencent was was was one the investor and the founders so to us them why can't we build a part ourselves why a small startup in Australia can do better than what we do we have you know hundreds of thousands in 40s and a big fintech division and and the investment team sort of not really sure what to say and the deogas kind of go stored for a couple months until I had the opportunity to meet with the president in Hong Kong and able to kind of convince him to continue to you know he would convince him to convince the founder of Tencent to approve the deal and you know at that time we were only have a few weeks and money left in the bank and kind of almost you know bifroctal and you know we also raised around serious day in the middle of a COVID and I remember that the kind we we we were about to close around and the U.S. stock market crashed three times like a 30% essentially so the count 10% down on day 10% down on Thursday and then Friday we were closed on Friday evening I wouldn't show up we we able to close around because our revenue also down 30 40% it just matter a couple months because we have bunches customary intuition and travel all kind of went to zero but lucky the investor you know that close around so you know that's many of these stories happened the rather last decades yeah I think those are important stories for founders to hear because I feel it's a lot of founders who are you know they're trying to raise an A it's really hard they're working with a strategic who's on one hand a great partner on the other hand they have these conflicts that they have to navigate around the investment team versus the business wanting to do things so thanks for sharing some of those things there are a lot of folks listening that probably going through similar experiences to what you've been through I think one other thing I wanted to talk about too is just how your go-to-market has worked so we've talked about the product how it's had these kind of three distinct phases but how do you think about kind of marketing to yourself to customers and in particular I think it's interesting you guys have built out a partnership with McLaren F1 team which before they actually started leading the constructors championship this year so maybe talk about just how you think about go-to-market broadly yeah we just as the DNA of Airwall has really kind of started in the structure of business is very much of a setting to enterprise customers is a very sort of outbound sales driven and that was the case for I guess the first five years the company and at one point we realized we need to kind of do go-to-market in so many different countries and it's very efficient of you know using just sales and only outbound to to kind of a power customer we start building marketing functions with the company more from a very outbound driven company to you know now to kind of probably like I would say six seven years out in the journey that we start to have you know marketing function without having a partnership team and over time you know now nowadays probably like 70 plus percent the customer acquired from marketing so it's kind of really shifted from an outbound motion to a majority of a inbound motion a partnership motion and as we kind of shipped into that inbound motion that we spent a lot of money of paid and organic but at certain point you couldn't really invest more money because the car just sort of become inefficient and that the LTV to car gets doesn't make much sense that's where we realized we need to keep investing in brand and top the funnel and middle funnel and doing a 40-integrated campaign so that we can continue to, in our more market dollar for the CAC to work. And that's basically what we started. We started this journey about two years ago. We sponsored my phone and obviously we got far-lucky and my phone was a tier two team at a time but then they just did it extremely well when the constructive championship last year and it probably didn't go well this year again. And we were also started sponsor arsenal and then doing all our home campaigns and integrated campaigns. And as we kind of invest in more top-of-the-final and we found that we can put more dollar into the lower final so basically pay the organic investment that we just lost quarter. We saw our new customer grow about 50% and CAC went down 30% because we're able to put more dollar into work and as we invest in more market the investment on Brad kind of is stable but that kind of stopped getting lost. And how did you know when it was time to invest in doing these global brand initiatives because a lot of companies that are starting to scale they're trying to side between do I scale engineering product go to market and sales or do I start investing in brand and if you invest in brand oftentimes there's kind of a large nebulous ROI so have you been able to measure how effective that's been for air wallets? I think we didn't know I mean I'll give what we could have invest a bit early but because we didn't know and and it's always hard to understand the ROI of investing brand because it's harder to measure because the only way to measure is fully loaded CAC right and and we but at that point we already kind of break even so the company is not burning money and we kind of and we still have close to half a billion in the bank or kind of sort of able to experiment a few things and even we make mistakes and we we should you know that shouldn't damage the company so much will not change the trajectory of the company and we also really struggle to kind of getting the efficiency you know by putting more dollar into paid and SEO and you know that's kind of when we started to sort of experimenting investing in brand and fully fully integrated campaigns. So basically you know company is break even you realize doing paid acquisition you've kind of kept that out but now that you're break even it's like okay let's invest in brand and see how that experiment plays out. Yeah I mean arguably we'll probably should have invested a bit early and and we also sort of didn't realize at what point we need to invest more into paid because we invested the brand for about you know four quarters and we sort of from Q4 early Q1 this year we start putting more dollar into paid and we just found our efficiency is just getting basically a lot of ROI on the paid right but we could arguably did it you know for the earlier. Yeah one of the ways to do brand too is you as the founder talking about what you're doing the company you're really really quiet for about nine years and then you've come out and you're a lot more vocal on a lot of things about airwallix about stablecoins about just kind of company building stories so why did you go from being quiet to talking a lot more publicly about your own story and the story of airwallix. I think it's just partly because of my personality I never really wanted to talk about you know how great we do or you know how much traction we just not I mean maybe it's kind of the culture in Asia and Australia is just like people just not get used to talk about themselves and how good they are but you know I think welcome to America. Yeah so I think I'm kind of just learning from all the Silicon Valley founders and and they really kind of able to build a brand on on social I think and now some of the founders in Europe I'm sitting there and then I look at how you know lovable and you know you level apps doing that and I was like wow that's really made it made a made a huge difference and you know I you know do I I'm not really enjoying doing that but I feel like as a CEO the company I have the responsibility to to to kind of do my job and it's part of the job is really be vocal about and be confident about my point of view and also representing airwallix is a brand because we also you know kind of almost like this like we deserve a big better than than where we are from a brand point of view like to think about how many companies in FinTech at 900 million in rap you've got a 90% year and then people never heard of right airwallix would be wrecked not a wide-knock category if you like me and I feel I'm responsible to kind of tell the story to the world that to to give the recognition to the employees that really worth the heart to executing in a lost decade and and we also at this pivot point of AI airwallix really build that infrastructure and then build the opportunities to sell a business opportunities so we can really have the opportunity to lead the race in a genetic finance and I feel with deserve you know the that has to not feel like a more people need to hear what we do yeah and one thing I've talked about with my founders all the time is you know you probably should talk about what you're building because going direct is one of the most effective ways to build a brand as a company I'm curious how you've seen that play out and where that's been most beneficial like has it helped you close new customers has it helped generate additional investor interest doesn't make it easier to recruit and hire employees like does one of those things stand out in particular or is it a bit across all of them I think it's probably a bit across all of them right so I think you know they said before there's just not many people have heard of us and at this scale which is very all-euroian in Silicon Valley and since I started doing that I heard a lot more positive feedback from both employees from your master from customer just anything I can do you know I you know also I encourage my employees to do that as well right so you know for me to to to ask other people to do something I need to be the role model and you know that I need to you know show in other people how devoted I am to to promote a company and that you know they should do the same you spend a lot of time work very hard building air wallets what do you do outside of air wallets or is it just air wallets all the time I mean I definitely work pretty hard you know for 10-20 years and but also you know I used to be a captain of a bot school team and I ski a lot and I you know I've been ski for 20 years and also swap to snowboarding about two years ago so I love to snowboard in Japan I play golf I started in kind of places to see these days or snowboard what's your favorite place to snowboard these days and this I go in evil card in Japan and then I'm calling in today from air wallets is San Francisco office so maybe tell us a little bit about the San Francisco office also do you have any expands for expansion or hiring here or just your kind of US go-to-market function generally yeah so I think we open an office you know about less than a year ago and now we have more than a hundred people sitting in San Francisco we also have offices in New York and have a bunch of people working remotely we the U.S. business has been growing triple digit for the last three years and open the Canada they last year sort of started starting and we have office in Toronto starting that business and we also did that position in Maxxu City so that we launched in Maxxu soon that we also got approval from the Central Bank in Brazil and we sort of setting up office in St. Paulo so you know really San Francisco is like our America headquarters that driving the moment not just the US market but also go-to-market across all the America countries and and we we have a bunch of folks in New York that kind of more doing the go-to-market stuff for the U.S. market as San Francisco we have a bunch of people many focus on the enterprise customers overall I think you know we should be able to double the U.S. office in the next sort of 12 months and we also kind of aggressively hiring engineers to build our AI initiative so building a new team in San Francisco work on our Airwater School College essentially is a bunch of AI agents to help all the customers who run FOD as autonomous. Yeah and that's one thing I want to dive into you guys have built all this infrastructure for global money movement. How does AI come into play and what kinds of products are you starting to build and offer your customers with AI? You know it's essentially for if you're looking at the last I guess 20-30 years the bank really to all they do is building regulatory infrastructure and financial infrastructure open Azure Service product that give into customer and then thanks to the cloud the rise of cloud and mobile internet and bunch of fintech really sort of starting optimizing the user experience that cloud native and also mobile first that got a lot of got them a lot of traction but for specific businesses because the income that hadn't really built you know a kind of cloud native infrastructure they haven't really moved all the data into a coherent data infrastructure and they haven't built any of the business opening system either. It's very hard for them to leave forward to building AI agents because for AI agents work you need to interact with the business openness system. So from that sense Airwater already built all the infrastructure globally and build a kind of application layer or the business open system. So really kind of we positioned very well to really leading the AI race to basically building everything or function in far as to you know giving up a custom efficiency ultimately autonomous and a far as function. Yeah so give like a couple examples of what like an AI agent might do on top of their rocks. You know they can help you to submit expenses they can help you to approve your procurement they can help you to looking at your revenue numbers and looking at your expenses number to help you to build a cash flow statement to help you to analyzing your your your your your LGB card help you to analyzing the houses is the business you know whatever that you ask your most of the work that you offer your CFO or finance director do today you should be able to that was AI in the future. So thanks so much for coming on I think one last question I want to ask is just what should people be paying attention to with regards to air wallets in the next year like what are the big things you want them to know are happening. I think we have a big sort of product launch in the in the billing space so because of the rights of AI and and on top of our merchant acquiring capability you know we look at to launch a billing product you know cross-boss or user-based billing or usage-based billing that's kind of complement with our merchant acquiring infrastructure so that we can help you know not just only SaaS company but also the AI companies to carry expanding globally. Awesome Jack great to have you here you guys just crossed a really big milestone what is it and what got you here. You know we you know 10 years in the business and we finally crossed the billing in annual revenue milestone that's like a huge milestone obviously the folks air wallets work extremely hard to achieve this you know massive milestone and but you know if you're looking at what's ahead of us we are perfectly positioned to you know build a genetic finance layer on top of the existing infrastructure and the business opportunities that we built some massive time that had of us I really think we're still in a very early on in our journey you know I really look forward to you know continue to to lead the company to you know when there's sort of AI a genetic finance race but also more importantly helping our customer to succeed succeed in in the global markets. Great thanks for sharing. Jack you announced a big new product today what is it why doesn't matter who's using it. We've been building this product for the last two years and then finally we're able to launch air wallets billing as we see all the AI businesses are kind of quickly expanding I feel that it's the right time for us to launch a full end-to-end software and infrastructure product not only helped them with merchant acquiring help them to optimise the costs and when they expand globally but you know more importantly we're able to offer in the billing software so that they can use air walls end-to-end that to help them to simplify the customer journey to optimise the cost and more importantly we are able to offer you know basically 12 months for free for all the folks that initially to stand up to this great billing part-off I really don't know for work with the you know most amazing AI companies around the world. I think you support user-based and usage-based billing. Correct. Awesome thanks so much for sharing.