Side hustles
Zhang spent his early years in China’s Shandong Province before he was sent to Melbourne to attend Westbourne Grammar School, where he lived with an Australian host family. When he was 16, his father lost his job at a regional bank back home, leaving Zhang to provide for himself. He picked up a series of gigs — lugging lemon boxes at a factory, washing dishes at a local restaurant and as a petrol-station cashier. After finishing school, he enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study computer science. That relentless work ethic and always-on mentality of his school years stuck with him. “I always had a side hustle,” Zhang said.
By the time Zhang started Airwallex with his co-founders — Lucy Liu, Xijing Dai and Max Li — he’d already amassed a roughly $US10 million fortune working full-time in various engineering roles while also pursuing side ventures like the real estate development group he started, Hohen International. While working as a solutions architect for the foreign exchange team at National Australia Bank, Zhang started Tukk & Co., a coffee shop in Melbourne, with his college friend Max Li. That eventually led them to found Airwallex.
Zhang spent his early years in China’s Shandong Province before he was sent to Melbourne to attend school, where he lived with an Australian host family.Credit: Simon Schluter
A constant headache for the duo was that their payments to coffee bean vendors in Brazil and Indonesia were repeatedly blocked. After some investigation, they concluded another person with similar name to Li was on the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s blacklist, resulting in problems with cross-border payments that were being routed through the US. Zhang went down a rabbit hole and concluded the system of sending payments through a conga line of banks to reach the intended destination added unnecessary cost and over-complicated compliance.
“I’m a solutions architect,” Zhang said of his thoughts at the time. “I can build a better system to essentially give retail customers the interbank rate, give them full transparency and make sure they don’t need to pay a whole bunch of spread.”
‘Always on’
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In order to make that vision a reality, Airwallex holds licences around the world permitting it to open bank-like accounts in more than 70 countries and enables international transfers to 200-plus countries using local infrastructure in roughly 120 of those. The company is Singapore-based, but with members of the executive team spread around the globe. Zhang primarily splits his time between London and New York, while also trying to remain available for his global employee base.
The latter is becoming increasingly hard. The firm now has more than 1800 employees in 26 offices around the world.
“He’s always on, perhaps sometimes to a fault, and also very generous with his time,” said Paul Bassat, Melbourne-based co-founder and partner at Square Peg. “If people ask Jack for his time, his default answer is ‘yes.’ It’s a lot of demands on his time and you can’t solve that problem by just working harder.”
The Australian Financial Review reported last year that intense workplace culture had led to high staff turnover. The same year, Zhang shared in a blog post that the company had under-invested in the people and talent team, but had expanded those operations to support employees.
Zhang himself doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. After the most recent fundraise, his goal is to build Airwallex into a complete operating system for global businesses by increasing its investment in technologies like artificial intelligence.
Zhang said he plans to have Airwallex ready for an initial public offering by the end of 2026.Credit: Bloomberg
One place where Zhang’s viewpoint diverges from Stripe’s Collison brothers is on stablecoin and cryptocurrencies. Last year, Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge for $US1.1 billion. Zhang has taken a more cautious approach, opting to wait for additional regulatory clarity before investing heavily in the technology. In June, Zhang dusted up a spirited debate on X after expressing doubts about use cases.
“I still don’t see a single use case yet on how crypto is helping anything in the last 15 years,” Zhang wrote.
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While Zhang has lofty ambitions, he faces steep competition from Stripe and other fintechs like Nium, another global cross-border payments firm that was valued at $US1.4 billion last year. Zhang says the demand for banking and payments platforms designed to accommodate international operations is on the rise.
“Tech-native businesses are more likely to be global from day one,” Zhang said. “Any mum and dad selling on Amazon or Shopify is a global business.”
Bloomberg
