Airwallex can support a wide range of industries and business activities. Onboarding is straightforward for simpler business natures such as wholesale trading, e-commerce, digital & services.

Airwallex is also able to support investment holding companies, single family offices, businesses dealing with precious metals and high-end jewellery (a license may be required in jurisdictions where such activities are regulated; e.g. a DPMS license for Hong Kong businesses issued by the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department).

Airwallex’s onboarding scope may differ depending on where your business is registered. For more information: UK, Hong Kong, Singapore.

Airwallex supports entities incorporated in 60+ jurisdictions, including US, UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even offshore jurisdictions like BVI and Seychelles. The full list can be found here.

Airwallex primarily assesses an application from two compliance perspectives: 1) background of the company’s UBO(s) (those with 25% or more shares or voting rights in the company), and 2) the applicant’s ability to demonstrate proof or intention to carry out their described business activities.

For newly established businesses without operations yet, a detailed business plan or website that clearly describes the services or products to be provided may be sufficient to satisfy Airwallex’s KYC (know-your-customer) requirements.

This is the funds collection capability inside the Airwallex account, and one of the biggest advantages that Airwallex offers. Airwallex partners with licensed banks across the globe to offer local account details in 14 locations (known as Global Accounts). All approved Airwallex accounts instantly get access to all Global Accounts which are created on-demand, and require no additional approval. Here are the full details of each available Global Account location:

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Local account details across 14 global locations, created on-demand with no additional approval.

Airwallex offers competitive currency exchange rates and the capability to transact in close to 1,000 currency pairs across 64 currencies.

With our Hong Kong company, we were offered 0.5% markup above the interbank rate on major currencies like USD, HKD, GBP which is average market pricing, but we feel like the pricing is negotiable especially with bigger volumes.

Payouts is essentially the feature allowing you to send money to suppliers, employees, contractors, marketplace sellers, or your own accounts overseas.

Airwallex’s network coverage is genuinely broad. Local payment rails to 120+ countries (free of charge), SWIFT to 200+ countries, and 90+ currencies. Where local rails are available, you skip the SWIFT network entirely, meaning faster, cheaper, and fewer intermediary banks taking a cut along the way. You can send individually via the dashboard, in bulk via batch transfers (useful for payroll or supplier runs), or programmatically via API.

For businesses that send regularly to the same recipients, the beneficiary management is solid - you save bank details once, validate them upfront, and reuse them. The API supports scheduling, multi-layer approvals, webhooks for status updates, and FX rate locking, which is useful if you want to fix an exchange rate before committing to a payment.

What you need to understand about how it actually works: when Airwallex shows a transfer status of "Sent," that means Airwallex has dispatched the instruction to a banking partner — not that the money has arrived. "Paid" means the banking partner has started processing, but the payment can still fail after that point. This isn’t unusual in the industry, but it matters operationally: if you’re building anything on top of Airwallex’s API, you need to handle the full status lifecycle properly rather than treating "Sent" as a confirmation of delivery.

The gaps to be aware of: Delivery time is partly outside Airwallex’s control. Once they’ve dispatched the payment, banking partner hours, local holidays, and rail-specific cut-off times take over. Incorrect account details or recipient bank issues can cause failures that only surface days later.

On total cost: local transfers are free on all plans in most corridors, which is genuinely competitive. SWIFT costs HKD 120–200 per transfer. FX conversion adds 0.2%–0.5% on major currencies. For high-volume businesses, Airwallex will negotiate custom rates; worth asking if you’re moving significant volume regularly.

Airwallex Pay is a feature that allows you to send and receive instant transfers to and from other users who also use Airwallex. Benefits of Airwallex Pay include:

• Instant transfersFunds are credited into the recipient’s Airwallex account instantly
• SecurityThe recipient’s account details are verified by Airwallex to ensure payment is being sent to the right party
• No limitThere is no limit on the transaction amount or number of transactions you can make

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Instant transfers between Airwallex users, verified recipients, and no transaction limits.

Airwallex allows instant issuance of multi-currency Visa cards (both virtual and physical) for companies and employees. The best feature of the card is that it has zero foreign transaction fees (which usually costs 1.95% of the transaction amount), meaning there are no extra charges for using the card anywhere in the world.

The cards also allow you to pay directly in 10 currencies: AUD, CAD, CHF, EUR, GBP, HKD, JPY, NZD, SGD, USD. This means if you’re paying in USD, and you have sufficient USD balance in your account the payment amount will be directly deducted from your USD balance without any forced FX conversions. If the required payment currency is not available in your account, you can also select a primary currency to be converted from automatically.

By default, the cards function like a debit card which requires you to have funds inside the account. Credit cards are also available on an approval basis.

Airwallex’s payment acceptance stands out due to its vast network of local payment methods available, including Klarna, iDEAL, Wero, WeChat Pay, Alipay, on top of your standard credit cards. Another big plus l is that it sits inside the same ecosystem as your accounts, FX, and payouts — so you’re not stitching together a separate gateway, processor, and bank account and then manually reconciling them at the end of the month. This consolidation saves a genuine operational headache for cross-border businesses.

On the acceptance side, the coverage is broad: cards, digital wallets, bank transfers, regional wallets (WeChat Pay, Alipay,), buy-now-pay-later, and 160+ local payment methods across 180+ countries in total. You can go live quickly via hosted checkout, payment links, or ecommerce plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento. If you need more control, the API and SDK path lets you build a fully custom checkout experience with PaymentIntents, webhooks, and 3DS fraud controls built in.

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Local payment methods and checkout options inside the Airwallex ecosystem.

One thing worth understanding upfront: the 160+ payment methods and 180-country headline doesn’t mean every method is available to every merchant. What you actually get depends on your entity’s registered country, your industry, and sometimes an additional activation process with Airwallex’s sales team. Some methods are in beta or temporarily closed to new onboarding. Check what’s actually available for your specific setup before building around it.

On pricing, Airwallex offers blended pricing (easier to forecast) or interchange-plus-plus (more transparent on what you’re actually paying for each transaction type). Neither is universally cheaper — it depends on your card mix, volumes, and geography. For HK merchants, domestic card acceptance runs at 3.30% + HKD 2.35, international cards at 3.60% + HKD 2.35. Competitive with Stripe, not the cheapest thing on the market.

The main competitor context: Stripe has a stronger developer ecosystem and longer track record; Adyen is stronger for enterprise acquiring at scale; PayPal has more consumer trust in certain markets. Airwallex’s edge is the integration with its wider financial stack, not a blanket claim to be cheapest or most widely accepted everywhere.

Airwallex Yield lets you earn attractive returns on idle cash balances inside your Airwallex account, without moving money to a separate investment platform. You transfer funds from your cash balance into a Yield balance, Airwallex’s regulated capital entity (SFC-licensed in HK, CE No. BUL570) invests it into money market funds (think government securities, CDs, commercial paper; and you earn a variable return on it).

In Hong Kong, supported currencies are USD, HKD, GBP, and EUR. As of July 2026, indicative rates are:

• USD: 3.36% (Explore) / 3.46% (Grow) / 3.66% (Accelerate)
• HKD: 2.17% (all plans)
• GBP: 3.46% / 3.56% / 3.76%
• EUR: 1.87% / 1.97% / 2.17%

The underlying fund managers include names like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Fullerton, depending on currency and market.

What it’s good for: businesses sitting on USD or GBP operating cash that would otherwise just be idle. If you hold multi-currency balances anyway, which most Airwallex users do, earning 3%+ on USD without opening a separate treasury relationship is a legitimately useful feature that most competitors don’t offer. Wise has a similar structure; Payoneer and WorldFirst don’t have an equivalent product.

What you need to understand before turning it on: this is not a bank deposit. It’s an investment product. Principal is not guaranteed, returns are variable, and it is not covered by the Hong Kong Deposit Protection Scheme. Settlement back to your cash balance typically takes one to two business days, so if you need funds available same-day, keep those in your cash wallet, not in Yield. There’s no lock-up period, but that one-to-two-day settlement window is real and matters for cash flow planning.

Airwallex POS lets you accept in-person card and wallet payments through Airwallex-provided terminals, third-party integrated terminals, or SoftPOS (turning a compatible Android device into a contactless terminal). The product is aimed at physical retailers, F&B, hospitality, fitness businesses, and software platforms that want to add in-person acceptance.

The headline benefit is the same as the rest of the Airwallex stack: consolidation. If you’re already using Airwallex for online payments, accounts, and FX, adding in-store acceptance means your online and offline payments settle into the same account, appear in the same dashboard, and reconcile against the same books. For a business running both an online store and a physical presence, that’s a meaningful operational simplification.

On hardware, the primary terminal is the M90, priced at USD 150 per device (sold, not rented). You can also go standalone (simple, manual amount entry, no integration required), integrated with your existing POS or order management system, or SoftPOS on Android where available.

Airwallex’s expense management product covers two things: tracking spend on Airwallex-issued company and employee cards, and processing reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenses employees pay themselves. It’s built into the same platform as your accounts and cards, which is the core appeal — no separate expense tool, no manual export, no reconciliation across systems.

The workflow is straightforward: employee spends on their Airwallex card or submits an out-of-pocket receipt via the mobile app, it goes through a configurable approval chain, and once approved, it syncs to Xero, QuickBooks, or NetSuite. OCR pulls data from receipts automatically so employees aren’t typing in amounts manually. Reimbursements pay out directly to employee bank accounts via Airwallex’s payment network — including internationally, which matters for distributed teams.

The newer features are where it gets more interesting. AI Receipt Matching automatically links uploaded receipts to card transactions, reducing the back-and-forth of chasing employees for documentation. The Expense Policy Agent is an always-on reviewer that checks submissions against your company expense policy - flagging duplicates, missing receipts, over-limit spend, wrong categories before it even reaches an approver. You upload your policy, the agent applies it. It doesn’t block expenses or make final decisions (human approvers still do that), but it catches the obvious issues before they land in someone’s inbox.

The honest limitations: the card expense tracking is built around Airwallex-issued cards, not a universal aggregator for every card or bank account your team uses. If you need to pull in spend from HSBC corporate cards or personal Amex cards alongside Airwallex, you’ll need a dedicated expense platform (Expensify, Dext, Pleo) that handles that more broadly. The Expense Policy Agent also doesn’t currently evaluate company card expenses but only employee reimbursement reports, which is a meaningful gap if most of your spend happens on company cards. And approved expenses can’t be edited in Airwallex; if something needs correcting post-approval, it has to be fixed in your accounting system.

For businesses that’re already issuing Airwallex cards to employees and want approvals, reimbursements, and accounting sync in one place - this is a genuinely solid product. For a business with complex multi-system expense needs or a non-standard accounting stack, you’ll likely hit the edges of what it can do.

The Airwallex dashboard is clean, well-organised, and significantly better than most traditional bank interfaces. The main navigation menu on the left covers wallets, transfers, cards, and reporting - all accessible within two clicks from anywhere.

All key action buttons are highlighted in indigo for easy navigation.

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The main navigation menu covering wallets, transfers, cards, and reporting.

We also managed to create a company card in just two easy steps.

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Creating a company card in just two easy steps.

Airwallex also offers mobile apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store.