Airwallex’s new offering provides merchants access to over 800 million Chinese consumers on WeChat Pay, one of the world’s largest and most active communities of shoppers

Global fintech leader Airwallex has launched a new payment acceptance service in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore with WeChat Pay, allowing merchants to add WeChat Pay as an additional payment option on their e-commerce platform. The new offering will provide merchants global access to over 800 million Chinese consumers on WeChat Pay, enabling them to tap into a key Asian marketplace of active shoppers.

WeChat is one of the largest social media platforms in the world with 1.2 billion monthly active users. Its pay function (WeChat Pay) allows its users to seamlessly make payments in their local currency for their purchases. WeChat Pay handles over one billion transactions globally daily, demonstrating the regular spending habits of its users.

Airwallex’s WeChat Pay solution is designed to ensure smooth and fast flows of funds from buyers to the merchants. Payments made by the buyers in Chinese Yuan or Hong Kong Dollar (for Hong Kong users) are received by Airwallex and converted to the merchants’ currency of choice within two business days.

On the Airwallex platform, merchants can view, track and manage their WeChat Pay transactions and download settlement reports, as well as issue refunds to deliver a seamless customer experience. Airwallex is currently working on additional features such as a data analytics tool which will provide important business insights on WeChat Pay payments to help merchants tailor their strategies, and boost their sales.

Now available in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong, the new WeChat payment acceptance solution is a significant addition to the Airwallex product suite as the Group continues to build an end-to-end financial services product for digital businesses. With card payment acceptance also arriving this year, starting in Hong Kong, Airwallex’s customers will soon have multiple convenient methods to accept payments from anywhere in the world.

Dave Stein, Airwallex’s Head of Corporate Development in Australia said, “We have seen e-commerce thrive during these unprecedented times. We believe this transition is here to stay even after the global lockdown ends, life normalises and shops reopen. As more merchants transition online, they require a wide range of payment acceptance options to remain relevant to different payment preferences around the world. With our new WeChat Pay solution, we are enabling merchants to adapt in today’s climate and also helping them open the doors to one of the largest and most active consumer markets in this world.”

“Adding a payment acceptance solution to the Airwallex product portfolio is an important next step to enhancing our end-to-end financial services solutions. We are now perfectly positioned to improve the way businesses collect online payments and ensure that the process is as fast, secure and seamless as possible,” Stein continued.

Today’s announcement is a major milestone in Airwallex and WeChat Pay’s partnership. The two companies first collaborated in 2017 to integrate Airwallex’s high-speed, low-cost FX and payment capabilities with WeChat to lower costs on international transactions and increase the speed of settlements.

Airwallex was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2015 with a simple goal - to push the boundaries of global financial services capabilities in an increasingly borderless world. Airwallex has since secured over $360 million USD in external funding, supported by top-tier investors including Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, DST Global, Hillhouse Capital, Horizons Ventures, ANZi Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Gobi Partners and Salesforce Ventures. The company’s core strength lies in its proprietary tech-driven infrastructure to enable low-cost, high-speed and transparent international collections and payments (accessible via API), its business account and borderless card which helps businesses grow both domestically and internationally. Airwallex has grown to over 420 employees across 10 international offices (Melbourne, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Singapore, London, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Bangalore). www.airwallex.com