Christopher Wan

OpenPay joined @airwallex , and I couldn’t be more excited. We started the company 2.5 years ago with the belief that founders building subscription businesses should only need to use one product to handle all things payments. We began under unique circumstances. Unlike many startups, we couldn’t just “move fast and break things” while developing financial technology. Case in point, we didn’t go live for 10 entire months after we began building. Our first version was a narrow subscription management and orchestration platform. It was better than competition in the few ways that we believed were critical, but it was so barebones that it was hard to sell. OpenPay’s first set of customers were dear friends and deplatformed merchants. The next beachhead was analytics. We knew there wasn’t much love for existing players. We even thought about starting here as a wedge, but the truth was clear: to deliver a truly elite experience, we had to be the ones processing every transaction AND the context they carry. Every feature we developed toward this thread had a tangible effect on our ability to close sales. Once we saw this feedback loop work the first time, we aggressively repeated it. We added customized dunning campaigns, smart retry schedules, intelligent payment routing, and soon, we had a complete subscription optimization suite. It was developed enough that, on a sales call, we could 1) listen to the customer's unique configuration of pain points, and 2) respond with a tailored pitch and demo of how we specifically addressed them. This was when we really felt market pull. Conversions jumped and we started closing more deals than we lost. Volume would increase by a meaningful multiple week over week. The feeling on the team was night and day vs what it was just a few shorts months prior. We wanted to pile in, so we started throwing around ideas around raising money for the first time. We knew we had a direct use for venture capital dollars that would be ROI+. What started out as capitalization conversations with Cap49 (Airwallex’s CVC) evolved into conversations about acquisition. Our business was still early and we still had a lot of cards to turn, e.g. we had just started marketing for the first time. But meeting @awxjack made this an easy decision. It was obvious that he was a no BS execution machine who cared deeply about his people and his mission. That, coupled with the clear defensibility of Airwallex’s business and its truly global reach, locked it in for us. If not already, I think it is inevitable that @airwallex becomes a generational company. We are looking forward to playing as large of a part as we possibly can to making it happen.

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