While the Money 20/20 Europe conference buzzed with familiar topics like AI and stablecoins, the most critical conversations were happening at a more fundamental level. The real challenge? Fixing the complex plumbing of the global financial system. For Ciaran O’Malley, who leads the UK enterprise business for Airwallex, the focus is clear. It’s less about chasing trends and more about delivering tangible, effective solutions for businesses in a borderless economy.
“There’s this idea that there is one payment method to rule them all, and it’s nonsense,” O’Malley told Bobsguide on the conference floor. “There are right payment methods, for the right times, for the right clients.” This pragmatic, customer-centric view is the foundation of Airwallex’s strategy, moving past the hype to solve core transactional challenges.
Embedded Finance: More Than a Buzzword
Embedded finance was a dominant theme, and O’Malley was quick to clarify Airwallex’s specific role. “The embedded finance that we do at Airwallex is around holding funds, receiving funds and paying out funds,” he explained. “We’re transactional banking, effectively.” This sharp focus allows them to empower other businesses, including those in the embedded lending space, by providing the core infrastructure they need to operate, without Airwallex becoming a lender itself.
The company’s central mission is to make cross-border finance as seamless as any other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. “The concept of Airwallex is to make finance as easy as a typical SaaS solution,” O’Malley stated. He described the absurdity of old systems, where opening an account in Singapore from the UK could involve physically mailing documents. Airwallex replaces that friction with simple API calls. This enables businesses of all sizes to operate like local entities across the globe. A company in London, for instance, can have a US IBAN, instantly removing barriers and building trust with American customers.
A Grounded View on Open Banking’s Role
With eight years of experience in the open banking sector, O’Malley offers a nuanced and realistic perspective on a technology that has faced both high praise and sharp criticism. He argues that expectations have often been unrealistic. “As much as people want to chip away at it… when you look at the numbers of businesses that accept open banking payments… they do as well, if not better, than cards,” he asserted.
He highlighted the varied success across Europe. The UK, he noted, provides a high-quality user experience. Meanwhile, in the Nordics and Baltics, open banking providers can achieve a staggering 70% share of wallet at checkout. The key, he suggests, is to see it not as a silver bullet, but as a vital part of a diverse payments toolkit. “I used to have that very monoline view,” O’Malley admitted. “Now at Airwallex, we offer a full gateway… for some clients, maybe card payments are fantastic. Others, open banking is better.”
Navigating the Hype Cycles:
Stablecoins
O’Malley approaches the fervent conversation around stablecoins with a healthy dose of pragmatism. While acknowledging their potential, he cautions against seeing them as a cure-all, especially when robust, regulated solutions already exist. “No one can explain to me why it’s better than global wallets, local licensing, local payouts, apart from the fact that some VC is throwing money at it,” he remarked candidly.
For O’Malley, the true value of the crypto sector is the pressure it puts on the traditional fiat system to innovate and improve. The future, he believes, lies not in the extremes of SWIFT versus stablecoins, but in the efficient middle ground where companies like Airwallex operate. “You ping our API, and you’ve got money in Australia, in Aussie dollars… and you’re sitting with regulated providers,” he explained, describing a system that offers speed and efficiency within a secure, licensed framework.
AI
On Artificial Intelligence, O’Malley looks beyond the obvious internal productivity gains. He is more interested in the compelling frontier of “agentic commerce”—the ability to delegate financial decisions to AI agents. He painted a vivid picture of a travel platform where a user could set an agent to automatically purchase opera tickets when they hit a certain price point, even in the middle of the night.
“The solutions that have been presented today… involve an authorization at the point of transaction,” he noted. “My dad’s not getting out of bed to authenticate a payment.” This is where he sees a powerful intersection between AI and embedded finance. “I see AI as potentially being a big driver of embedded finance, because it’s delegated decision-making that embedded finance allows the money to move.” This visionary future, he concedes, requires a fundamental rethink of liability and authentication, much like the auto industry is doing for self-driving cars.
As the financial industry continues to navigate these successive waves of technological hype, O’Malley’s perspective is a crucial reminder. The most lasting innovations are not always the trendiest; they are the ones that solve real-world problems with robust, reliable, and regulated solutions. The future of finance, it seems, is being built by making the complex simple and the global local.
