Airwallex vs Stripe Connect

The real fight is over who becomes the default money layer inside global software platforms. Stripe Connect wins when a marketplace or vertical SaaS wants one familiar API for onboarding sellers, splitting payments, handling disputes, and adding adjacent products later. Airwallex is strongest where the hard part is not checkout, but moving and storing money across borders cheaply, then layering cards, local accounts, and payouts on top for globally distributed businesses and platforms.1 2 3 4

• Airwallex has pushed deeper into platform payments because that channel brings distribution. Around 60% of revenue came from its API and embedded products by 2024, including Payments for Platforms, while by March 2025 cards and payments made up over 50% of gross profit. That shows a move beyond FX into software driven fintech infrastructure.1 2
• Stripe Connect was built for multi party flows like Uber, where one payment has to be split among the platform and many sellers or workers. That matters because platform payments are operationally much harder than normal merchant checkout, with seller onboarding, reconciliation, refunds, and payouts repeated across thousands of sub merchants.3 4
• The customer shapes the winner. Stripe is broader and much larger, with $1.9T in payment volume and $6.8B revenue in 2025, and sells the full bundle of checkout, billing, issuing, and treasury. Airwallex is smaller at an estimated $700M annualized revenue in March 2025, but built around cross border money movement, with 93% of transactions processed outside SWIFT.1 3 5

Going forward, Airwallex is likely to keep moving upmarket with platforms that need both embedded payments and native cross border treasury. As software companies become more international from day one, the gap between simple pay in and complex global money movement gets more important, and that is where Airwallex has the clearest path to take share from Stripe at the platform layer.1 2 3