🎧 Live from HumanX: Airwallex Head of Product Shannon Scott on Reshaping Global Payments, Building Elite Teams, and How They’re Leveraging AI

Podcast Episode · This Week in Fintech’s Podcast · 03/26/2025 · 26m

Apple Podcasts

In March, we traveled to the inaugural HumanX conference in Las Vegas to meet founders, builders, and investors at the bleeding edge of AI. The conference was a great success, and we're excited for it to relocate to San Francisco next April.

You can read some of our takeaways below:

This week, Darrell Etherington and I traveled to the inaugural HumanX… | Ryan Zauk

This week, Darrell Etherington and I traveled to the inaugural HumanX conference, bringing together leaders across global AI. We met with several folks across…

LinkedInRyan Zauk

While at the conference, I had the chance to sit down with Shannon Scott, SVP and Global Head of Product at Airwallex. Airwallex is the global payments and financial platform for modern businesses. Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Airwallex has become a dominant global player in financial infrastructure, serving some of the world's largest cross-border companies like Canva, Brex, Navan, Rippling, SHEIN, and more. Airwallex was last valued at $5.6Bn in 2022 and is backed by investors like Sequoia, Index, Tencent, Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine, Greenoaks, Mastercard, and more.

In this episode, Shannon and I discuss:

• His transition from Palantir to Airwallex and lessons learned from Silicon Valley culture
• Airwallex's global product suite and vision for building a global financial platform through products like multi-currency wallets and the new 'Airwallex Spend'
• Airwallex's use of AI in fraud management, customer onboarding, and process automation
• Scaling great teams in fintech

And much more. Enjoy the show.

🎧 Live from HumanX: Airwallex Head of Product Shannon Scott on Reshaping Global Payments, Building Elite Teams, and How They’re Leveraging AI

Podcast Episode · This Week in Fintech’s Podcast · 03/26/2025 · 26m

Apple Podcasts

--

Airwallex is a leading global payments and financial platform for modern businesses, offering trusted solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, treasury, and spend management to embedded finance. With our proprietary infrastructure, Airwallex takes the friction out of global payments and financial operations, empowering businesses of all sizes to unlock new opportunities and grow beyond borders. Proudly founded in Melbourne, Airwallex supports over 150,000 businesses globally and is trusted by brands such as Brex, Canva, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more.

Shannon Scott is SVP, Global Head of Product at Airwallex. Shannon is responsible for product strategy and delivery across all Airwallex domains including card issuing, online payments, business accounts, and platform infrastructure. He was an early employee of Palantir Technologies, where he founded Palantir's international operations in both Australia-New Zealand and Europe. He was responsible for building out the initial business development and delivery teams in both regions, where clients spanned both government and large commercial enterprises. Shannon has a combined degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University or Melbourne and has focused on the intersection of software engineering and technical business development throughout his career, including in an advisory capacity to numerous Australian startups.

Ryan Zauk is the Host of the This Month in Fintech Podcast and Bay Area lead for the broader This Week in Fintech platform. In his day job, Ryan is an investor at OMERS Ventures, the direct investing arm of one of the world’s largest pension plans with over $130Bn in net assets. Prior to OMERS, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s Tech Investment Banking team focused on M&A and capital markets. He is based in the Bay Area. You can find him on Linkedin or Twitter.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan Zauk: The views expressed in this podcast are the speaker zone and are not the views of this week, FinTech or any other person or entity. The content provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, business tax, or investment advice or recommendation, solicitation endorsement, or offering by me or anyone else for the sale subscription or purchase of securities, or for investment advisory services of any kind.

[00:00:30] Nik Milanovic: But first a quick word from our sponsor fund box. Imagine offering your customers instant access to the working capital they need right where they do business on your platform. Fund box offers embedded lending solutions that integrate directly into your platform, providing a full suite of capital products tailored to your customer's cash flow needs.

With over a decade of experience, fund box delivers customizable credit solutions, including invoice financing, lines of credit term loans, payroll protection, and more. The robust infrastructure ensures bank grade compliance and ample funding to support your platforms at scale. Join the many industry leading platforms who have partnered with funbox to enhance their offerings and drive customer loyalty and success.

Give your customers the financial flexibility they need to grow while you provide them a seamless, trusted lending experience. Visit fund box.com/partners. That's F-U-N-D-B-O x.com/partners to schedule a demo and discover how we can help you unlock financial growth for your customers. Loans and lines of credit are made by fund box or its bank partners.

[00:01:39] Ryan Zauk:: Hello everyone and welcome to our second episode of the day Live at Human X, uh, the world's leading AI conference. I'm joined live in Vegas by Shannon Scott. SVP and Global Head of Product at Air Wall. Shannon, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

[00:01:54] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Thanks, Ryan. Uh, great, great to be here. Flew over from Melbourne yesterday.

Um, so I've made a special trip for this conference in Vegas. Pretty excited. How's the jet lag hitting today? Uh, okay. You know, um, I, I was eager to, to make sure this was a time that I wasn't like gonna be completely asleep, but Right. Um. You gotta dive in. All

[00:02:13] Ryan Zauk:: right, well, let's do it. So we'll start with some easy questions to warm you up.

Starting with you just a few years out of undergrad, you joined a company in 2008 called Palantir. It was pretty new at the time. They're a real company of the moment. How did you meet them and what kept you there for, you know, 10 plus years?

[00:02:29] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah, I was, I was honestly very fortunate and if you think about like going back to 2008 in Melbourne, like the tech community, it's just not a thing, right?

Mm-hmm. Like. Um, I think Facebook, there was no Canva. Facebook adjust found its way. I think the iPhone was still not available in Australia. There's a few people job breaking it to be it, you know, be available mm-hmm for Australian users. But through personal networks, I discovered some of the folks at Palantir and they had a lot of traction.

Um, oh a lot at the time, working with sort of some of the US um, intelligence agencies crave, um, and the Australian intelligence Services had actually become aware of what was happening over there and pretty eager to learn more. So they were looking for an Australian guy. If could get the necessary security clearance of this to actually be able to work with those agencies.

Mm-hmm. And that really founded the, the opportunity to work in Australia. Yeah. Um, prop Palantir was their first international employee. Right. And, you know, as an a Australian having the opportunity to work with a, a Silicon Valley company that was dead set on being a hundred billion dollar company, which they actually only recently reached.

Right. And you know, sort of scrolling forward 20 years into their lifespan, I'm like. Either way, wherever this company goes, it's just gonna be an amazing opportunity.

[00:03:32] Ryan Zauk:: Yeah.

[00:03:33] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: And uh, and it was,

[00:03:34] Ryan Zauk:: and then so you rode that wave for 10 plus years before departing. I know it's a bit of a challenging question, but what are the biggest lessons you learned from that time in Palantir and as you mentioned, that Silicon Valley ethos that maybe weren't exposed to in Melbourne?

[00:03:46] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: I think a few things Palantir really got right, was they, they were. A cult-like approach to hiring the right people and really focusing on the mission. Mm-hmm. Um, and so the people were, were excellent just from very, very high standard. And I think the effort that it took to penetrate some of those large organizations and, and bring value to the analytics software actually providing to those customers.

It was really important that everybody was able to, to go deep and, and make that happen very, very early on. And everyone really believed in, in creating an impact for customers and really driving the outcomes that you now see today. Yeah. Um, and some of the opportunities that have been been created since.

Yeah. So thinking about, you know, our wallet is also, you know, we have similar ambitions to be a, you know, a company of the size of Palantir. Yeah. And so if we don't have the right people who are aligned on that journey. Have the ability to get us there, then it won't happen.

[00:04:34] Ryan Zauk:: Yeah, and that's probably takes me to my next question.

You're kind of top, top of your game. 20 18, 20 19. Palantir doing phenomenally, eventually found your way to Air Wallacks. What attracted you to that opportunity? You alluded to it a little bit. I saw in another, I. Interview you got a funny story about recruiters pitching different offers and the air Ws one doing the exceptionally good job.

[00:04:54] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah, it was, it was interesting. So I actually, for the last few years of Palantir, I was working in New York and that was also a great opportunity, but I decided that wasn't the right long term apparent. Mm-hmm. Which I think a lot of people probably discover. I mean New York City. And so I did return to Australia and I was looking for the, for the next thing.

The most exciting part of that growth curve is, you know, early on or when you're maximizing the velocity of the growth of the business and that, so I was looking for fairly early stage companies, but I probably went a little bit too early and a few of the sort of startups mm-hmm. That I initially joined, uh, didn't work out and AWOL actually thought was already on its way.

They'd reached a billion dollar valuation. I'm like, this, that's incredible. But probably they've already got the people they need and, um, and, and I'm, I'm sure they'll do great, but connecting with Jack through the, uh, recruiting team. I recognized he was very serious about where he wanted, say the company, very ambitious.

And there was still a lot of work to do. Um, and, you know, I could have an impact that was actually going to, to help evolve the future of the business. So I think for anybody looking for a role like product market fit is, is really important. Or making sure that the, the company on its way in terms of its scale.

[00:05:54] Ryan Zauk:: Yeah.

[00:05:54] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Um, and then trying to basically maximize the gradient.

[00:05:57] Ryan Zauk:: And then let's talk a little bit about Air Wall today. Massive platform seems constantly bolting on new products, launching into new geographies. Can you give our listeners a sense of the general platform and offering today some sense of scale for Airex?

[00:06:10] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah. Great. So Airex currently valued around five point, uh, 6 billion USD. We've got about 1700 employees, um, in a, a variety of locations around the world. It started with the financial infrastructure. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's very globally oriented, so we're really helping businesses operate globally. You know, if you're selling it in the US to customers internationally, you want them to be able to make payments in their own currency, feel like they're using their own payment methods.

And so the, the core infrastructure is really around a multicurrency wallet, the ability to collect funds in dozens of currencies from around the world. Using a variety of account numbers are store in a variety of currencies, utilize a Visa card that actually can also settle in those direct currencies.

Mm-hmm. Um, and then we offer over 160 different local payment methods for Wow. For businesses to, to sell online. So if you're a business that does a lot of global sales, this is probably the right payments infrastructure for you. And so we've taken that infrastructure, we sell in a variety of, of countries to a broad customer base, not only to smaller sort of SME businesses, so you can use their interface directly, but also to large platforms who actually want to embed.

Our infrastructure into their own services. So here in the US for example, Brex, nand, rippling and bill.com, um, are, are actually using airwa under the hood.

[00:07:21] Speaker: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:21] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Um, to, to support a lot of their, like foreign financial flows. Mm-hmm. Um, so, but the infrastructure's available direct and, and through platforms.

Um, and then we're spending a lot of time now is actually building the sort of business process software. That makes it really easy to, to leverage those financial services. So Air Will Expend, for example, makes it really easy to issue employee cards, to upload bills, to sort of structure your expenses, go through your approval flows, um, and do it across all of the, the entities that you operated on the world,

[00:07:50] Ryan Zauk:: and then to make it come alive.

Could you pick one of those companies that you mentioned using Airwalk under the hood or more directly and. How they're integrating with AALS in some kind of before and after.

[00:08:00] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah. So may maybe I won't mention the specific customer. Yeah. Um, actually I might give you another example in a moment, but, but for the customers that I, that I just mentioned, you know, very often, you know, they started in the US that a very strong, uh, US customer base.

Those customers, as they grew larger, they also operated internationally. Right? Um, and so they're like, Hey, we love your product, but we also need to be able to like, make transfers internationally, or we need to be able to submit funds in, in Euros and pay out to employees in the same country, for example.

Mm-hmm. And so those platforms actually used air to facilitate all of the transactions, all of the farm currency flows, uh, under the hood. Um, whether that be the collections in Euros or also the, the payouts. So everything's happening under the hood. I think another really interesting example is a lot of online travel agents, this is a use case that's probably a lot more foreign to people, but I think is really interesting is when you make a booking online through these hotel aggregators, very often it's actually quite difficult to settle the payment to thousands of hotels that they're actually like working with around the world.

So

[00:08:53] Ryan Zauk:: this would be me. Booking my honeymoons. This is topical. Going on booking.com and getting a hotel in Rome

[00:08:59] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: or something? Yeah, that's right. And you're paying with your credit card and that, that works great. But actually under the hood, there's a separate transaction happening where that, like hotel in Rome is having that transaction settled.

It may happen instantly or it may happen at the time of your booking. Right. Um, and so that, or half to half. Yeah. And that hotel aggregator may actually use a card transaction as well to facilitate that purchase with the, the hotel in Rome. So we issue virtual guards that make it very easy for an organization like booking.com to actually make that payment to the hotel and say, all right, the currency is restricted to, to exactly this amount.

Um, you can only actually settle a transaction between, you know, the period that you've checked in or shortly after you've checked out. And they use our APIs to actually create. Tens of thousands of single use virtual cards. Wow. Um, that then they can programmatically issue to all of those hotels, um, and just send them the account numbers or the, or the, the card numbers in a very automated way.

And so it's really awesome to see just something as simple as card usage being operated at scale

[00:09:57] Ryan Zauk:: and then it's definitely a competitive market. How did you all think about go to market in the US and Canada? I know there are a lot of roots in East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the like. What was, what were kind of the key tenets of focusing on breaking into this big market?

[00:10:11] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah. I think actually like America is such a big country. I think it's probably not similar to a lot of the, the other regions we operate. Yeah. Because like a lot of companies have a very strong customer base domestically, which is, you know, in Australia for example, it's only 25 million people, 25

[00:10:25] Ryan Zauk:: million.

I did not know that Australia's population, maybe it, maybe it's, than, maybe it's high

[00:10:29] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: now. Maybe it's. That maybe it's 30. Wow. That's probably the number I don't want you to quote me from. Um, we'll fact check it, but, uh, you know, it's like an order of magnitudes smaller than the US Wow. That's that's definitely true.

Yeah. Right. Even though the countries enormous and, and so if you are selling, um, your, your product, you wanna sell it internationally, right. And, and you're sort of looking, looking internationally from day one. And, and so in the US I think while there's been a strong. Um, domestic focused. You still see a lot of customers who have those international needs.

Mm-hmm. Uh, buying or selling, um, through adjacent countries like Canada and Mexico or, or elsewhere in the world. And this is really our footing. Um, but then, you know, a lot of the software that we're building today and the payments, uh, solutions that we offer are actually still very competitive in terms of what the authorization rates.

Yeah. Um, in terms of price point. So a lot more customers are sort of coming across, recognizing they're doing a lot of volume and that they can get. Sort of a, a, a better price point than mm-hmm. Um, than what some of the incumbents offering.

[00:11:22] Ryan Zauk:: And then I did see, you know, in November you announced the launch of air wall spend.

Could you talk a little bit about this product and why you decided to launch it?

[00:11:30] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: When I think about where financial services are going in future, and I think one of the reasons why I'm so bullish on sort of technology entering the, the financial space is that the financial infrastructure is gonna sort of be more and more.

Sort of hidden under the hood of actually the software mm-hmm. That is facilitating those processes. Right. And so, uh, in the us you know, until very recently actually and, and still in some cases like paper checks are still being utilized. Yeah. You can't think of a more offline process. Right. Yeah. I actually

[00:11:55] Ryan Zauk:: heard last week that payment payments and check volume went up 15% year over year, last year in 2020.

[00:12:02] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: So it's still, still going. Um, it's growing, you know, maybe the of some things that we can teach the US about some of the payment methods internationally. Yeah. We can. We can help to, to bring here. Um, but it used to be a very offline process, right? And as we see, uh, stronger and stronger software offerings, um, everything is under the hood like.

Very simple example is if you get in a taxi, you used to sort of make a card payment at the end of the trip. Mm-hmm. And that was a very sort of specific process. Um, and now you get an Uber and you just think about making the booking, you don't think about the payment. Right. It just happens under the hood.

And, and really that's where I think financial services are going. And so it's very natural for us to start building software to start. Supporting those business processes that, that utilize the financial transactions. Um, and if you can do that sort of vertically oriented, um, then you can create a really neat coupling between the software that you're using, the, the transactions, um mm-hmm.

And, and actually be able to reconcile that very easily. It's like, okay, I got an invoice. Uh, I need to approve who's, uh, need to approve, um, that it's the right vendor to be paying. I need to make sure I sort of are paying it on the, on the right due date and the right currency. Um, and all of that is facilitated for you.

Air expand encompasses bill management, right. For that example, but also card expenses, reimbursements, vendor onboarding, and a number of those accounts payable. Mm-hmm. Aspects. So some of these products have been around for several years, like the, the card, uh, expenses. Yeah. Um, but we've bundled that as air expend, right?

Yeah. To make it sort of the all in one accounts payable software suite.

[00:13:27] Ryan Zauk:: And then Shannon, on a more personal side, how did you get up to speed on FinTech and financial services? Right. Coming from Palantir and then. To air Wallach, which isn't the most, I think payments can be a pretty complex business, especially cross border.

How did you get up to speed, especially in leading product, in an order like

[00:13:42] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: this? Yeah, that's actually a great question and it sort of comes back to looking for the, the right businesses, but the industry was less interesting to me. Much more about sort of the opportunity in terms of how the business can, can grow.

When I think about recruiting staff, it may be well and good that you have sort of experience in financial services. Right. Um, however, if you can't sort of adjust to bring those experiences into a, into a new company, then very often it actually sort of doesn't, doesn't work very well.

[00:14:06] Ryan Zauk:: Yeah.

[00:14:06] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: And so joining in, um, if we go back five years now to 2020.

We're very ambitious. We still are today. We had a lot of different products. We didn't have all the staff we needed, and I ended up going very deep on our card issuing product. Mm-hmm. We just launched virtual cards. We didn't support physical, we only done it in Australia. Oh, wow. We didn't support digital wallets and so I actually ended up working very closely with the engineering team to, to start to roll out as new features, and it was a blessing for me, like operating as an individual contributor and really going deep Yeah.

To understand the product. Is the most important thing. And, and before sort of entering the financial services industry, like everything seems a bit magical, right? Like you tap your card, right? And um, and, and the money's deducted and, and it all works, right? But actually it is just a network, right? Yeah.

It's just, uh, software. And I think as long as you, you sort of have the, the technical ability to go deep, then, then you can learn things very quickly. Yeah. So started with the issuing product and then gradually expanded into the role I have to do.

[00:14:59] Ryan Zauk:: Got it. And is, are there any other key tenets you thought about in team building, especially coming from your Palantir?

It's funny you mentioned that blend of kind of generalist intellectual athlete with subject matter expert. When we talked to Zach at Plaid, he said he does this 80 20 principle of. 20% specialist from like an FIS, Jack Henry, 80% just smart hustlers.

[00:15:18] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah. And, and you know, and I'd actually, you know, so very often would bias us a hundred percent on just, just smart.

And I guess that was sort of, um, that's the bet that Jack made on me given I didn't have the financial experience. Yeah. There are some cases where it's really valuable, like I think. In payments, like on fraud, on authorization success rates. I think that is, there's some art there. Yeah. And some real experiences that you can learn about, you know, about, about how the network operates and, and, and how that may be u utilized legitimately or illegitimately and, and understanding this.

But in most cases, I think people who are relatively early in their career. And have the motivation and to hustle to really, to really learn, then they can do it. The other thing that's interesting too is this company, you know, it's where it's today is not where it's gonna be in, in five years from now.

And I'm, I'm very bullish on, on the growth. That's, that's why I'm part of the company. And so whatever experience you have today, you need to be able to sort of keep evolving that experience right around, um, our business and what that business looks like in five years. Yeah. So that. That sort of plastic mind is the most important thing.

[00:16:18] Ryan Zauk:: And so on that kind of future state, how do you think about product sequencing? Right. That's why I was. Think about like there's a blend of quick adoption to market trends building into a future that you're projecting or just eyeing the competitive landscape, how do you balance those three forces for what to launch?

[00:16:34] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah. I think like there's no shortage of things that we want to build, uh, into the future. And so it really becomes a, a prioritization question. Mm-hmm. I think there's, there is a real breadth of financial services available. Like one area that we need to spend more time on and, and will over the next 12 months is, is credit solutions to help customers.

Yeah. Um. Better understand their, their cash flow and, and get to sort of smooth that out with, with, with credit. Um, so that's something that we're just, just starting on. However, honestly, I wanna work as fast as I possibly can, right? I think there's no substitute for. For high velocity, um, not only because you can sort of get markets to get, get products to market faster, um, but you can also iterate on Yeah.

On sort of what you're seeing and, and, and what's working. So if we go back to 2020 and, and, and pre covid actually interest rates were, were very low and we were looking at, um, lending solutions then because there was a big demand for capital. Um, and over the following years as interest rates went up. We actually needed to pivot, um, and switch over to an, to an interest generating product.

And that's when we produced, um, Aero X yield and, and that allows customers to generate a rate of return on, on multiple currencies. So we were able to sort of pivot to capture that opportunity at the time. Um, and now we've pivoted back to, to lending. But certainly both solutions are very important. And yeah, what I look for is how do they sort of incrementally benefit the existing product suite and customers can sort of naturally move into them.

So. It was very natural for customers already using our visa cards to want to have better controls on how they're utilized and be able to allocate them to their employees. And so it will expend sort of came out of that. Um, and then on the accounts receivable side, we'll start to bill. Billing software that can help with invoicing, with subscription management.

And that's sort of a natural extension of our payments platform. Mm-hmm.

[00:18:12] Ryan Zauk:: And then let's talk a little bit, uh, about ai. We are an AI conference after all. Maybe to start, how is Airwalk using AI right now in its business?

[00:18:19] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah, so there's a, a, a lot of different areas and I think what's interesting is, you know, what, what we're building internally as well as the vendors we're utilizing, right?

There's just so many opportunities for with internal productivity and then the product itself. Um, what we've been doing for a long time is, is. You know, the areas of fraud, we have a very sophisticated, uh, fraud platform because we're threading in many different countries, the behaviors can be quite different.

Um, and some countries, uh, some regions are sort of. Much more active than others, especially with global software, you know, they wanna be able to access mm-hmm. Let's call 'em sort of, uh, innocent fit folks around the world. Huge. Um, you know, wanna keep their money safe. And so we've built very sophisticated sort of risk and fraud management to deal with the fact that we're operating across so many different countries.

And, you know, it's interesting to see the different, um, behaviors evolve over different, different countries. And so. Obviously there's a variety of models there that are working really well. Right. But also on onboarding, you know, because of the fact that we're regulated in, in so many different countries and, and we have sort of quite specific regulations mm-hmm.

As to how we onboard customers, you wanna make that experience as frictionless as possible, and you wanna make sure you understand your customer so you're offering them the right services. Yeah. And just understanding of, of businesses, incorporation documents, uh, the website, what are they actually selling.

Um, AI can actually summarize this. Far more effectively than a human can, and we can often generate sort of outputs or, or decisions in terms of whether that customer is sort of immediately onboard or we need information, uh, more effectively than a human can. So, for example, with website scanning, we used to have sort of very static rules to say, to make sure they weren't selling things that were outside the guide guidelines of our regulars.

Right. Um, but it would catch things like, you know, military goods or, or alcohol, for example. Right? But when we pivoted over to using, um, LLMs. You could actually see that, oh, it's actually a military jacket. It's a clothing company. Right? It's a champagne colored dress.

[00:20:06] Ryan Zauk:: And that's interesting. 'cause I, I almost thought it'd be the opposite where the human would pick up that, or the traditional star would pick that up and AI might be able, or might gloss over it.

[00:20:14] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Actually, we've seen it the other way. Wow. So AI's been, um, been really great and providing a, you know, um, a much faster onboarding experience for customers, which is, which is really exciting. Then on the process side, so if we, if we come back to air, well expand, we wanna automate. The financial operations team.

Um, and there's so much opportunities to take, like what is a, a well laid out set of steps. You know, I'm, I'm onboarding a vendor, I am issuing a purchase order, or I'm receiving an invoice. I'm, I'm going through an approval flow to validate that invoice is actually, uh, what I expected. I'm scheduling the transaction.

I'm making the payment, uh, categorizing the spend. Mm-hmm. And then I'm understanding my cashflow. All of that process is already there. Right. Um, but. The opportunity for AI agents to actually sort of fill in the gaps and remove the manual process and automate that, I think is very natural. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's gonna happen incrementally.

You know, it's not gonna sort of suddenly AI's doing everything for you. Right. But what you're gonna see is just, is far less time spent.

[00:21:09] Ryan Zauk:: Yeah. Um,

[00:21:10] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: administering those types of services, we already have the process in place and so deploying agents is relatively easy and, um, yeah. Safe way for us to, to benefit from ai.

[00:21:19] Ryan Zauk:: Where have you kind of outsourced some of that work? To maybe a, you know, a customer service specialist, AI firm Yeah. Versus building this all homegrown. And are you using any, you know, popular models out there, whether it's OW or open AI anthropic?

[00:21:32] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Yeah, actually it's a, it's a good question. So, for example, we're actually working with p of, of ours in one of our, our portfolio companies, uh, in Australia.

He is helping us with, with customer support chatbot. So in that case, we're sort of outsourcing to, to a startup that's actually based in Australia, which is really exciting. That's right. Um, but then some of the investment was done with, with GCP and using, uh, Gemini. Just as an example, we used to pay a third party vendor to do the OCR and sort of field extraction for receipts, for example.

And we've now found our vanity use Gemini to replace it at I think like a hundred for cost and dramatically more accuracy. 'cause it's just so much stronger at, um, not just the structuring, but also translation. Mm-hmm. Summing all, all of those aspects. Mm-hmm. It's amazing to see how quickly you can. Adopt those technologies.

And so as those models are getting better and better, it's relatively easy for us to embed than ourselves.

[00:22:21] Ryan Zauk:: And then zooming out on the broader AI market, especially given your experience at Palantir and now Airwa, are there any areas you find are especially overhyped right now? And then just as importantly, any that are under hyped that you're very excited about?

[00:22:34] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: For me, I think it's just, it's gonna be an incremental journey, right? And I think certainly there's a lot of hype on lms, and I think a lot of people, like a lot of consumers are benefiting very quickly and they're seeing this very. Very visibly. Right? Right. Um, and, and so, you know, just let me help you write that letter for you built into Google Box, for example.

It's like, Hey, I was already using this product and now it's like magically correcting it for me. That's. That's really awesome. But I think those have been in tech for a long time. They've actually known that those things have sort of been like, sort of creeping up for many years. And so you're using a lot of these models already in, in things like fraud for example, or authorization success rates.

And, and so there's somewhat less of a, a hype around sort of what's happening, but actually a reality is sort of incrementally building. Mm-hmm. Um, so no, there's no specific area that I think is like dramatically over or underweight, but I think it's just much more of a gradual, gradual transition. And I think the companies that have.

The strong sort of frameworks in place to be able to leverage these AI agents, especially as they improve over time. Uh, so if you are doing in your customer support, for example, you know, do you have the right sort of chat bot framework? Can you easily delegate in queue with a human, integrating with your, um, your task management system?

For example, if you have all of those features laid out, then you can keep improving the models over time and you're gonna have a really great product. Mm-hmm. Diplomatic answer. Appreciate it. I, I think actually it's, you know, it's diplomatic, but I, I, you know, I'm a bit of a tech pessimist to be honest.

Really? I told yeah. I just like, like, I don't get too, too excited. I, I don't really believe in like, companies that are dramatically innovating. You know, apple might bring out a new iPhone feature and Android users are rolling their eyes, right? Because, 'cause that's been in like some Samsung device for 10 years.

For 10 years. But everyone thinks Apple invented it's right. I think if you actually are paying attention, then it's, yeah, a little bit more of a slow, uh, progression. And I think like. Just like air's roadmap and some of the things we wanna build next. I think it's very clear what our customers are asking for.

I just need to deliver it to market as quickly as I can. Mm-hmm.

[00:24:27] Ryan Zauk:: And Chan last question here as we're thumbing up on time. What should, uh, what should the team hope to expect from Air Wall in the coming years? Uh, which our audience be looking out for?

[00:24:36] Shannon Scott, Airwallex:: Well, I'm honestly just really excited about the future of.

Financial providers like AOL just really becoming a much bigger part of business's general financial operations. And, and so there's some other great players in the, in, in the FinTech space, for example. There's a lot of technologies there, but really the majority of the industry is still supported by traditional banking.

Yeah. And they, they might be able to provide the infrastructure, but they're not gonna be able to support the software that we talked about. They're not gonna be able to introduce the, the sort of AI and, and newer technologies the same way a technology company can. And so I'm really excited with the software building on top of our infrastructure, including Air Wallick building, and it's time to see sort of a greater and greater market share of companies like Air Wallick supporting your everyday banking needs.

[00:25:15] Ryan Zauk:: Got it. Awesome. Well, Shannon, thank you so much for coming on today's episode of this Munk and FinTech podcast. It's great to have you on. Thanks, Ryan. Great to be here. Thank you.