I enjoyed my time at Airwallex. But I can talk to some of the struggles the business is facing from my perspective within the ANZ commercial team.
a) As the company prepares for IPO, getting things done internally has become increasingly difficult. (Necessary) additional risk and compliance hurdles have slowed things down, however frustratingly few of the decision owners that can get things done actually have backgrounds in financial services.
b) In Australia, the business struggles with commercial leadership; this has been a bit of a recurring issue since day dot. The talent pool is far smaller than overseas, which has created a bizarre spectrum of leaders. For anyone joining Airwallex in AU, I'd encourage you to explore some of the LI profiles of the previous sales leaders over the years, throw a dart and you might end up with a leader with international banking or consulting at a tier 1 firm, or some seemingly random dude who inexplicably has been gifted a position of authority. As an IC it was never clear to me what this process was, but I had the pleasure of working with a number of our leadership: The good ones were good, the bad ones were phenomenally bad.
c) The business struggles to retain knowledge (in AU). The business has made a trade off in its hiring to not target profiles from commercial banking or consulting, which carries both pros and cons. The major downside is a broad lack of understanding of the wider business banking environment, which exacerbates the issues from a) and b). Ultimately, the AU business has traditionally relied on a small number of core, experienced people, and the risk it carries from losing any one of these is quite high.
I do want to note that I genuinely did enjoy my time at Airwallex and these cons are potentially nitpicking. I left Airwallex having felt like I had grown personally and professionally.
