Review contents
Airwallex Business account makes it super easy for businesses of all sizes to manage their multi-currency international payments. You’ll be able to send and receive money globally very quickly, and very easily, at interbank rates. You don't have to worry about managing lots of local bank accounts to make your payments, Airwallex will take care of everything in a single account. They have a wide range of products like FX transfers, employee cards, expense management, online payments and more.
Airwallex is a business payment and financial operation platform for pretty much all types of businesses who operate internationally, or have customers or suppliers using different currencies to their own (i.e. have sales or purchases in another country), and want to send and receive money in multiple currencies swiftly and easily.
It’s actually a bit of a revolution as previously it was expensive and difficult to get paid in a different currency other than your local currency, and that’s if your bank allowed you to, and if they did, there would often be very hefty fees. Airwallex effectively solves all of this.
Note: it’s just for large scale enterprises and SME’s and not for solo entrepreneurs. Unless you’re a registered one-man-band business, then it’s also for you too. If you’re looking for just yourself and for potentially things like holiday spending, here’s the best travel money cards.
With Airwallex, you have an all-in-one business account, and you can send and receive payments in multiple currencies globally.
In fact, you can use over 60+ popular currencies, send money to over 150 countries, and accept payments from over 180. All often the same day.
On top of that, Airwallex is more than just a currency transfer tool, it’s a full business account you can use to manage your business finances. For instance, you get a business debit card (or a few) that allows you to spend in a wide range of currencies (online and in-person), alongside managing all your expenses. And you can even send payment links to your customers making it easier for them to pay you.
You can connect your Airwallex business account to your accounting software (such as Xero or QuickBooks), and if your business is a bit tech-savvy, you can develop or integrate your own products and systems into their API to programmatically manage your global payments and financial operations.
We’ll run through how everything works in more detail in just a moment.
There’s also a mobile app to manage things on the go, and it’s pretty good too, and very highly rated on Apple, with a rating of 4.9 out of 5. Although only 2.3 out of 5 on Google Play.
If you’ve heard enough already, head over to the Airwallex website¹, and you’ll also get 10% cashback on your first $1,000 worth of transactions (with Nuts About Money). Otherwise, let’s dive into the details now.
You don’t need to be a massive global company to use Airwallex. It is suitable for very large companies but also small businesses too, that want to send and/or receive multiple currencies – that’s the beauty of modern payment and technology companies. If you want to make cross border payments, Airwallex is probably a good option for you.
For example, you might be selling your products in the UK, but are buying or manufacturing the product in another country. If you were to use your regular UK bank account, they’re likely not going to let you send money in another currency to pay your invoices, or if they do, they’re going to charge pretty hefty fees, and it will likely take days or even weeks for it to arrive. With Airwallex, you’ll be able to send money swiftly (often the same day) in the currency you need, all for a very low fee using the best exchange rate possible (the interbank rate). This could help your business save a small fortune.
For larger businesses who operate globally, with their teams receiving, buying, selling, or spending in various currencies, you can bring it all together into one business account and manage it all simply and easily.
Get $100 cashback for free when you make $1,000 worth of transactions.
Imagine your bank account now, with your bank details (e.g. account number and sort code in the UK), well, imagine setting that up and managing a bank account in 20 countries across the world…
The paperwork, the fees, the organisation and account management (think of the login details), it would be a nightmare. Even setting up just one bank account in another country is near-enough impossible if you’re registered in another country.
Imagine the team you’d need to manage all the different accounts, and the fees each account would charge for payments and transfers.
Well, that’s where Airwallex comes in. You open one single Airwallex business account, and in turn you’ll almost instantly get a local bank account set up for you in whichever country you operate in (or want) – there’s over 60+ countries with local bank accounts available, from which you can then send money to over 150+ countries and receive money from over 180.
You can open an Airwallex business account online and collect international payments from global customers in their preferred currency. You could then also spend the proceeds later in the same currency, eliminating unnecessary conversion fees.
That’s the basics in a nutshell anyway, and then there’s lots more features, such as employee cards and accounting software integrations – imagine a single account to manage all of your global spending and payments, that’s Airwallex.
Airwallex is pretty great at managing and facilitating all of your spending globally. Instead of managing lots of different bank accounts in the countries you operate in, you issue multi-currency employee and company cards to your team members around the world to streamline their local and global purchases. All the expenses are integrated in your Airwallex account.
You can do things such as setting spending limits, plan larger expenses, and track receipts and invoices (which uses AI to scan the receipt and upload the information automatically, so no more relying on your team member to add things manually). You also get a real-time view of card activity.
Your employees from across the world can upload bills for you to approve and pay, and there’s an approval system to authorise expenses, set to your own rules and controls, for instance who needs to approve the spend from certain teams, automatically approve small bills from certain teams or flag larger bills for future review.
And finally, you can reimburse employees directly from your Airwallex account too. It's like they've thought of everything!
Airwallex integrates with almost all of the popular accounting systems, such as Xero, Quickbooks and NetSuite. This means you can speed up your cash flow cycle, automate everyday tasks, and categorise expenses directly to your chart of accounts.
You can get company cards and cards for specific team members, multi-currency cards that allow your employees to make purchases in multiple currencies from held balances in your account. You can instantly create and you can start using them immediately online, and pay for purchases anywhere Visa is accepted, both online and in store.
You can use both virtual cards and physical cards, and features such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
If you run a business that accepts payments directly from customers, for instance an ecommerce store that operates in various countries (or even just one country), or maybe a subscription business, you can use Airwallex to accept payments directly – making things easier for your customers. Streamline your finances by receiving and disbursing funds in the same currency, eliminating the complexities of multiple accounts and unexpected conversion charges.
It can integrate directly into your online checkout flow, either with pre-built options, or even with your own integration with the Airwallex API.
You could then use the funds arriving into your multi-currency wallet to pay out to suppliers using Airwallex’s global payout network or corporate cards.
We won’t run through all the technical details now, but there’s advanced tools using machine learning (AI) to improve payment success rate, save customer payment details for future purchases, and help detect fraud by monitoring payments.
Payments have separate fees, and depend on which card and country is used. We’ll run through the fees next.
Airwallex has a range of plans suited to different sized businesses, with the free or lower cost plan suited to smaller businesses, and each plan stepping up in features until you can effectively build a custom plan suited to how your business operates and what features you’d like.
Note: the prices below are excluding VAT. And we haven’t covered every single fee. What you’ll actually pay depends on what services and features you use.
The Explore plan is the lowest cost, and can be £0 per month if you are actively using the account – you’ll need to either hold a balance of at least £10,000, or deposit at least £10,000 per month. Otherwise, it’s £19 per month.
You’ll be able to have multiple accounts open (if you want to), and will be able to have accounts with over 60+ of the largest currencies across the world, all with local bank details for suppliers or customers to pay you easily.
Sending money (transfers) is free to over 120 countries, and you’ll get the ‘real’ exchange rate (the interbank rate) for currency conversions (so effectively the best exchange rate possible), plus any additional currency conversion fees (more on that just below).
You can also make batch transfers (so make a large amount of transfers in one go).
With the debit card, you can get up to 10 company cards (in the business name) and 5 cards for employees (in their name), all able to spend in multiple currencies with no fees.
And you can accept payments via sending a payment link, and accept online and card payments globally.
The minor drawback with this plan is that you’ll only be able to sync your transactions with Xero (if you use it), it won’t sync bills or expenses, but you can do that with the next plan.
There’s also other integrations with various accounting software tools and platforms such as Shopify and Amazon.
If you’re a tech company with a development team, you’ll also get API access to integrate and build your own systems.
It’s pretty good value overall for these features and capabilities, particularly if you get it for free each month, but otherwise, still good.
This plan is designed for slightly larger businesses with a medium sized team, where you can manage all their spending.
You of course get all the previous features, and you also get up to 50 free company cards, and expense management features to manage all your team's spending. Alongside things such as spending approvals, automated receipt and bill tools (where it scans and saves the details automatically), removing the manually typing of things every time you purchase something.
You’ll also be able to integrate bills and expenses into Xero.
This plan is for large businesses looking to manage all their global finances in one place. You’ll get a dedicated account manager for any issues or questions, who will learn your business and recommend what the right solutions are to make Airwallex work for your business, and you’ll also get full onboarding support to make sure Airwallex works for you.
If you use Netsuite for your accounting, you’ll also be able to integrate.
If the previous plan wasn’t enough for your business, you can create a custom plan and work with Airwallex to develop customised solutions for your business. You’ll be able to customise the API to do things you need.
There’s also the potential for embedded finance options to integrate Airwallex directly into your own product or service you provide to customers.
Depending on the currencies you are using, and the currency you are swapping to and from within your Airwallex account, you’ll pay a currency conversion fee, which can also be called a foreign exchange fee.
This ranges from 0.20% to 1%, depending on the currencies. Airwallex offers the best exchange rate possible (the interbank rate), with this fee on top. It’s 0.5% above interbank rates for major currencies, 1% for all others.
This fee is to process transactions from customers using their card (e.g. a customer shopping on your website). Here’s a run through of all the common fees:
The customer support is good, and it runs 24/7. There’s an informative help centre online, with pretty much every question you’d have answered. If you have further questions, you can then email in directly, or message in via a contact form on their website.
Or, if you’re in Canada, China or the US, you can call on the phone directly. Unfortunately, it’s not available in any other countries (including the UK) just yet.
If you are a larger business, you’ll get a dedicated account manager (who you can email and phone), and support to help you onboard, for instance, help moving from another platform to Airwallex.
Yes, Airwallex is safe to use and is a well established and trusted platform to use (across the world).
In the UK, it’s authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which means they have been approved to look after and protect your money, and are continually reviewed.
In other countries, Airwallex is regulated by the relevant regulators where necessary, and adheres to the required standards of each region it operates in.
Airwallex has a good reputation overall, and on the popular reviews website, Trustpilot, it has a decent rating of 3.8 out of 5. For a financial company, that is actually very good, and lots of the reviews mention how good the customer service is.
With financial companies, they often get lots of 1 star reviews as some customers aren’t able to sign up for various reasons (for instance because their industry isn’t supported by the financial company just yet).
Here’s a quick recap and the pros and cons of Airwallex:
We think Airwallex is really great – it saves so much time, effort and money for international businesses, and simplifies multi-currency payment systems into one Airwallex account. It’s suited for all sizes and different businesses (as long as they want to send and receive different currencies), not just those huge multinational corporations, so the little guys can save some admin and fees too.
Airwallex is effectively an all-in-one solution for a business account, and we can’t think of any reasons why you’d still operate lots of local bank accounts – especially as it pretty much covers the whole world, being able to send 60+ popular currencies to over 150 countries, and receive money from over 180.
And it’s more than just an international payments tool, there’s a huge range of features to manage teams in different countries and how they spend (expense management), with full control over their budgets and company cards. Plus, some handy features such as invoice and receipt reading with AI, and things like setting rules for approvals (meaning much less work for both employees spending and the finance team).
The list goes on, and we recommend checking it out if you are in the market for an account to manage your international business – save time on what really matters, growing your business, rather than all the admin behind the scenes. It’s 5 stars from us.
Airwallex have also got in touch to give our readers 10% cashback once you make $1,000 in transactions too. Not bad. And there’s also a free trial. To claim the deal, head over to the Airwallex website¹.
Get $100 cashback for free when you make $1,000 worth of transactions.
Get $100 cashback for free when you make $1,000 worth of transactions.
Get $100 cashback for free when you make $1,000 worth of transactions.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
We're experts in all things money, with years of combined experience working in the finance industry and writing about money. We understand the ins and outs, how to get the best deals, save money, and how to communicate money in an easy to understand way (we hope you agree).
More than 20 years of combined experience researching and writing about money
Researched and reviewed a wide range of financial services companies, and have a transparent review process
We follow a strict editorial code to ensure you get the best information possible
Get $100 cashback for free when you make $1,000 worth of transactions.
