March 2023 Summaries

Heath Barnett, Airwallex’s San Francisco-based Head of Growth Sales for North America, describes a career path from enterprise-sales consulting for companies including Facebook, Microsoft, and Uber to helping businesses develop commercial go-to-market strategies and launching Uber’s Texas sales team. He joined Airwallex to help grow its US business and values its global, culturally diverse workforce, which he believes encourages creative problem-solving despite time-zone and cultural differences. Barnett favors work-life harmony over a traditional schedule, balancing early gym sessions and dedicated family time with an intensive work routine driven by his enthusiasm for building businesses. He also emphasizes that strong culture supports productivity, citing a US team offsite that combined planning with team-building activities. Motivational speaker Eric Thomas is a personal inspiration to Barnett because of Thomas’s resilience, spirituality, and ability to encourage others through adversity.

Airwallex’s quarterly product update emphasizes global growth through a smoother checkout experience, adding FPS for domestic payments in Hong Kong and Atome, a buy-now-pay-later option serving more than 20 million users across Southeast Asia and Greater China, to its network of over 160 local payment methods. The company notes that offering familiar payment options can help reduce cart abandonment and improve international conversion. It has also expanded expense-management capabilities so employees designated as Company Card contacts can submit card expenses for approval without administrator access. An upcoming QuickBooks Expenses integration will automatically sync card transactions and expense data with users’ charts of accounts, aiming to streamline monthly reconciliation and closing processes.

Interchange++ is a card-payment pricing model that itemizes the costs of each transaction, including interchange fees charged by the customer’s card issuer, scheme fees charged by networks such as Visa or Mastercard, and a processing fee charged by the acquirer, such as Airwallex. These underlying fees vary according to factors including card origin, merchant category, and transaction location, so merchants using Interchange++ pay the actual transaction costs plus a fixed markup and receive a detailed fee breakdown. This structure can reduce costs on lower-fee transactions but may increase them when issuer or network charges are high. Airwallex also offers blended pricing, which applies a fixed variable rate to card transactions and may make monthly costs easier to forecast, although it provides less fee-level transparency. Interchange++ applies only to card payments, while alternative methods such as PayPal or Klarna are charged at a blended rate.

An International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is a standardized alphanumeric identifier, used mainly in Europe and some other countries, that helps financial institutions route and validate international payments by specifying the account’s country, bank, branch, and individual account number. Introduced through ISO standards to reduce errors, delays, and costs caused by inconsistent national account formats, IBANs can contain up to 34 characters and include a country code, check digits, and a Basic Bank Account Number, with lengths varying by country. Countries such as Australia, the United States, China, and New Zealand generally use account numbers with routing and SWIFT/BIC codes instead. IBANs can usually be found in banking apps or statements and are generally safe to share for receiving payments, though card security details should remain protected. An invalid IBAN will typically cause a transfer to be rejected, while a valid but incorrect recipient account may receive the funds and can be difficult to reverse. IBANs are commonly used alongside SWIFT/BIC codes, including for SEPA euro payments, while transfer costs depend on the payment network, currency conversion, and service provider.