September 2026 Summaries

Airwallex has revamped its Business Accounts to provide growing global businesses with a centralized view of entities, accounts, balances, users, permissions, and financial activity. The platform enables organizations to manage multiple legal entities, move funds, handle payees, convert currencies, and adjust settings without using separate logins, while allowing detailed views of individual entities or accounts. Businesses can create dedicated accounts for operating cash, yield-generating funds, and expenses, then transfer money internally or fund accounts externally as needs change. Airwallex also promotes integration with preferred AI agents, which can automate financial workflows such as liquidity rebalancing, idle-fund management, and foreign-exchange timing within user-defined rules and approval controls. The service supports global expansion through multicurrency accounts with local bank details, local payouts in more than 120 countries, and FX services, with AgentOS using consolidated financial context to help manage liquidity and payments.

Agentic Banking describes a model in which AI agents continuously observe, decide, act, and reconcile across corporate finance activities, including receiving payments, paying suppliers, and managing cash across entities and currencies. Rather than requiring finance teams to manually initiate individual transactions, agents could pursue defined outcomes within approval rules and other controls, such as maintaining payment buffers, allocating incoming funds, or transferring liquidity where needed. Its effectiveness depends on unified financial infrastructure that provides real-time context, permissions, global payment connectivity, regulatory coverage, and secure reconciliation, since fragmented systems can interrupt automated workflows. Airwallex positions its licensed global financial platform and planned Agentic Business Accounts as infrastructure for this transition, while noting that businesses should assess whether their existing systems give agents sufficient visibility and authority to operate safely.

Airwallex began transforming its CFO organization by mapping nearly 600 Finance and Corporate Development tasks, about 80% of which recur, to identify time demands, process bottlenecks, and automation opportunities. Controllership emerged as the largest user of Finance hours, with month-end throughput identified as a critical priority because delays in its interdependent closing process can affect the entire reporting cycle; automation is intended to free regional controllers for more judgment-based local work. The tax team is standardizing financial-data collection and reconciliation across more than 25 countries while building a centralized filing hub expected to reduce outsourcing costs by roughly $1 million annually. Treasury has automated many daily, repetitive activities such as forecasting alerts, rebalancing, and foreign exchange tasks, aiming to increase capacity for liquidity optimization and forecasting, while FP&A is using AI to reconcile inconsistent budget inputs and accelerate forecasting so staff can focus on analysis. Based on the assessment, the company has created team-specific AI roadmaps containing around 100 projects, including solutions developed by employees, and plans to track progress through leadership accountability and efficiency-focused objectives.

Finance leaders are increasingly scrutinizing AI investments because they must balance promised productivity gains against implementation costs and uncertain returns, with more than a third of current AI users reporting no plans to expand usage this year. Key barriers include limited experience managing AI-enabled finance processes, difficulty proving value beyond short-term efficiency, fragmented financial data, and shortages of professionals who combine accounting expertise with data and AI skills. AI projects may also require longer payback periods than traditional technology investments, making returns difficult to isolate when deployments coincide with broader changes to systems, processes, and staffing. Rather than signaling abandonment, a pause in AI spending can enable organizations to standardize data, strengthen controls, reduce manual workflows, and train staff before scaling tools. Examples from ServiceNow, Shopify, and Levi Strauss suggest that measurable benefits are more likely when AI is embedded in specific operating processes and tied to clear business outcomes. The article argues that reliable data, consistent transaction coding, connected systems, and redesigned workflows may matter more to finance AI success than selecting the latest model.

Airwallex, founded in Melbourne a decade ago to simplify international business payments, says its global financial platform helps companies manage payments, billing, cards, spending, treasury, and multiple currencies while increasingly using AI-driven automation. A Mandala Partners study commissioned by Airwallex estimates that the company generated A$4.6 billion in economic benefits for Australia in 2025, including A$2.5 billion in direct benefits for customers and A$2 billion in wider economic activity, with effects equivalent to supporting about 29,000 full-time jobs. The report also estimates that regional, rural, and remote areas received more than A$1.1 billion of these benefits, while typical small and medium-sized business customers gained roughly A$200,000 annually through productivity improvements, lower costs, and international-market access. Airwallex customers reportedly save an average of A$13,400 per year and 12.4 administrative hours per week, and are 1.5 times more likely than Australian SMBs generally to expand overseas, trading in an average of 4.5 foreign markets. The company presents Australia as evidence that improved financial infrastructure can reduce barriers to global growth and suggests comparable relative impacts could be substantial in larger markets, while noting that such comparisons are not forecasts.

James Hurman, co-founder of Tracksuit and an advertising effectiveness researcher, argues that as AI makes products, execution, and market entry easier to copy, brand becomes a company’s most durable compounding asset. While strong products can attract early adopters, broader consumer and business markets tend to favour familiar, distinctive names, with LinkedIn B2B Institute research cited as finding that 81% of major deals go to vendors known by buying teams before formal procurement begins. Hurman attributes this advantage partly to familiarity and emotional bias, which can make customers perceive known brands as safer and better, pay full price, tolerate price increases, and remain loyal. He argues that brands should preserve their core identity when entering new markets while adapting language and cultural presentation where necessary. Although finance teams often prefer the measurable short-term returns of performance marketing, he says econometric research estimates advertising can return about four dollars in revenue per dollar invested over two years, and multiple studies support a marketing balance near half brand investment and half performance activity. In this view, products create initial access to customers, but brand recognition, trust, and pricing power determine whether a company remains memorable and competitive as markets mature.

Airwallex’s September updates introduce T:0, an AI-native accounting tool designed to convert real-time financial data into reliable accounting records, alongside enhancements to payments, billing, spend management, and embedded finance. Merchants in 35 countries can now offer eligible US shoppers Affirm’s pay-over-time options through Airwallex Payments, while French businesses can issue compliant structured e-invoices through Billing and receive vendor e-invoices automatically in Bill Pay. Billing also adds Direct Debit support for ACH, SEPA, Bacs, and EFT, enabling customers to authorize reusable bank mandates for invoices and subscriptions. Platform users can send payouts directly to PayPal wallets through an API and establish card spending limits in more than 85 currencies, helping globally distributed businesses reduce foreign-exchange-related payment declines.