Airwallex omnichannel strategy increases wallet share

Airwallex’s POS push matters because it turns a narrow cross-border payment vendor into a broader payments operating system for merchants. Once a customer runs both website checkout and store terminals through the same stack, Airwallex can capture more payment volume, more domestic acquiring, and more adjacent products like FX, treasury, cards, and billing. That matters because over 50% of gross profit already comes from higher margin payments and card products rather than legacy cross-border flows.1 2 3

• The practical workflow change is simple. A merchant can take card payments in store, take payments online, settle funds into the same Airwallex account, convert currencies, and use the same system for payouts or employee spend. That reduces the need to split volume across separate in store, gateway, FX, and banking vendors.1 3
• This follows the playbook used by Stripe Terminal and Adyen, where in person payments deepen account control rather than just adding hardware revenue. Airwallex now competes with Stripe Terminal, Square, and SumUp, but with a stronger pitch to globally operating merchants because POS is bundled with cross-border FX, global accounts, and card issuing.1 4 5
• The economics are attractive because Airwallex is already shifting toward products with better monetization than pure FX spread. Airwallex reached about $130B in transaction volume across 150,000 businesses by March 2025, and later nearly $300B annualized volume across 200,000 businesses by May 2026, giving it a large installed base to upsell into omnichannel acquiring.2 3

From here, the likely path is deeper bundling. In store acceptance pulls merchants into the rest of the stack, and that sets up Airwallex to sell billing, treasury, lending, and software around reconciliation and checkout. If execution holds, offline payments become less a hardware business and more a wedge for turning merchant volume into a larger share of each customer’s financial operations.1 3