Kelly Bayer Rosmarin joins Airwallex board as valuation soars to $9.6bn

The fast-growing Aussie fintech worth nearly $10bn has appointed former Optus chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin as a director amid other changes.

Airwallex has appointed Kelly Bayer Rosmarin to its board. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Airwallex - an Aussie fintech worth almost $10bn - has appointed former Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and former Optus acting chief Michael Venter as directors of its new board.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin is also a former executive at Commonwealth Bank where she helmed its institutional banking and markets division.

The Airwallex directorship marks the first high-profile appointment since she left Optus in late 2023 after appearing at a bruising Senate inquiry into a nationwide outage.

In a statement, Airwallex said Ms Bayer Rosmarin would contribute “strategic advice and governance experience” to the company. She has previously worked at Boston Consulting Group and is currently a director at REA Group, a position she has held since the start of 2022.

Airwallex unveiled a new board after its valuation has soared to $US6.2bn ($9.6bn) from $5.6bn following a Series F $US300m raising.

Payments behemoth Visa supported the raise as a “strategic investor” as Airwallex intensifies its battle with the big banks.

Michael Venter.

Mr Venter is Optus’s chief financial officer and stepped in as interim chief executive after Ms Bayer Rosmarin left the company. He held the position until late last year when Optus appointed former NBN Co boss Stephen Rue as its permanent chief executive.

“With vast experience in Australia and Asia emerging markets across banking, wealth management and telecommunications, Michael brings robust expertise to the board and is the chair of the risk and audit committees,” Airwallex said.

Other directors include the fintech’s global head of product Shannon Scott; Sangeeta Venkatesan, who is also on the board of Mercer Investments; and MHC Digital Finance portfolio manager Andrew Palmer, who previously held senior roles at ANZ and JP Morgan.

Airwallex co-founder Lucy Liu said the company’s annualised revenue almost doubled to $US720m this year as its customer base soared 50 per cent to 150,000 businesses worldwide. Ms Liu now expects it to hit $US1bn in annual run rate revenue, as it expands deeper into the US and emerging markets.

She said in the Americas and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), gross profit had vaulted more than 250 per cent in both regions. The latest capital raising brings its total financing to more than $US1bn.

“It’s been almost three years since our last raise, and it was good timing for us to get a validation from the capital market in terms of our growth and our potential,” Ms Liu said.

“It was good timing to refresh the valuation of our company as well as getting fresh capital to further grow the businesses. We’re looking at Latin America, Middle East as well as some South-East Asian countries.

“In terms of product, we are growing beyond obviously just payments, extending our services also into financial platforms. For example, spend management, treasury management as well as an AI (artificial intelligent) product that we are building at the moment. We do believe that with the combination of SaaS (software as a service) and AI, we can further help our customers and the finance managers as well as CFOs make better financial decisions.”

Airwallex – which Ms Liu, Jack Zhang, Max Li and Xijing Dai founded in a Melbourne cafe a decade ago – has become one of Australia’s highest-valued private companies as it targets what it labels as “apathy” from the top four banks.

Its business has been built on enabling quick cross-border transactions and has expanded to savings, with the company launching a “Yield” product in late 2023, which allows its customers to earn interest on US dollar balances without needing to open an overseas bank account.

It also allows people to freely access funds without being tied to term deposit lockup periods, with the minimum threshold slashed from $500,000 to $10,000 last year, allowing it to target retail customers.

Ms Liu said Visa Ventures joining as a “strategic” investor that would help the company build “better products”. She said Airwallex had been working with Visa since it issued its ‘Borderless Card’ five years ago, which was designed to streamline international payments.

“It’s been a very good partnership.

“We’ve been able to build some quite innovative solutions in the market for our customers, growing the partnership in different regions as well. Going forward, we’re happy that there’s an extra connection in addition to the financial partnership that we have, and hopefully we can build better products for our customers at the same time.”

Airwallex co-founder Lucy Liu.

Square Peg, DST Global, Lone Pine Capital, Blackbird, Airtree, Salesforce Ventures, and several leading Australian superannuation funds including Hostplus and NGS Super, also participated in Airwallex’s latest capital raising.

“Amid all the market uncertainties, I think this is, you know, still a good validation of our business model from an external perspective,” Ms Liu said.

Square Peg founder Paul Bassat said: “From its roots in Melbourne, Airwallex is evolving into a generational global company”.

“Its product offering meets critical needs for a large and growing cohort of global-first, digital-first companies that, in many cases, have complex financial services needs. Jack Zhang and his team are creating something very special, and we believe they are early in their journey.”

Late last year, Airwallex also pledged to give 1 per cent of the company to charity and programs aimed at supporting the next generation of innovators and start-ups, as part of the Pledge 1% program, joining Atlassian, Canva, Salesforce and other tech titans who have backed the cause.