A 2026 review of Airwallex: multi-currency accounts, FX at 0.5% over interbank, card acceptance, and free local transfers to 120+ countries. Who it fits and who should skip it.
Start with the thing that trips people up. Airwallex is not a merchant of record and not a simple checkout button. It is a financial operating account for businesses that touch more than one currency, and it stitches together the jobs a company usually splits across a bank, an FX broker and a payment processor.
In one login you get multi-currency accounts with local receiving details, corporate cards, payment acceptance for your customers, cross-border payouts to suppliers, and expense and bill-pay tooling on top. Founded in Australia in 2015, it now runs at the scale of a serious fintech. The center of gravity is the same throughout: moving money between currencies cheaply and holding it where you earn it. If your business never leaves one currency, most of that value is dead weight.
The account holds 20+ currencies and gives you local details in the major ones, so a US client pays your USD account details and a UK client pays your GBP details, with no forced conversion and no intermediary bank skimming the transfer. Money lands in the currency it was sent in and sits there until you decide to move it.
When you do convert, the FX is where Airwallex earns its reputation. Checked in January 2026, it charges 0.5% above the interbank rate on major currencies and 1% on the rest. Compare that to the 2% to 4% spread a high-street bank buries in the rate and the difference on a five-figure conversion is real money. For a business paying overseas suppliers or collecting revenue abroad, the exchange rate is usually the biggest hidden cost, and this is the line item Airwallex was built to attack.
On the money-out side, local transfers to 120+ countries are free, and SWIFT wires run roughly $15 to $25 each when a local rail is not available. That combination lets you pay a contractor in the Philippines or a supplier in Germany without the flat $40 wire fee a bank would charge, provided a local route exists.
On the money-in side, Airwallex processes cards and 160+ local payment methods. The rates, checked January 2026, are 2.80% + 30¢ on domestic cards and 4.30% + 30¢ on international cards. Read that second number carefully. For accepting a lot of cross-border card payments, 4.30% is steep, and a specialist processor may beat it. Airwallex is strongest when payment acceptance is one part of a wider money-movement need, not when it is the only thing you do.
Rounding it out: unlimited multi-currency corporate cards with up to 2% cash back on local USD spend, expense management with receipt capture, bill pay, and a yield of roughly 3.2% to 3.5% on idle USD depending on plan.
The platform itself is tiered. Checked in January 2026:
Fees apply per business legal entity rather than per individual account, which matters if you run several companies. The genuinely useful part is that a small business can sit on the free tier and still get the interbank-adjacent FX and free local payouts, paying only the per-transaction and conversion costs. You do not have to buy a plan to get the headline benefit.
These three get compared constantly and they are not the same product. Wise Business is leaner and famously cheap on FX, ideal if all you want is to hold currencies and send money; it does far less on the acceptance and card-issuing side. Stripe is the better pure payment processor, cheaper on straightforward card acceptance and unmatched for developers, but it does not give you a real multi-currency operating account or supplier payouts.
Airwallex sits in the middle and wins when you need several of those jobs at once: collect in multiple currencies, hold without converting, pay global suppliers, issue cards to staff, and accept some payments, all in one place. Pick Wise if the job is only holding and sending. Pick Stripe if the job is only accepting cards. Pick Airwallex when the answer is "all of the above."
Airwallex is right for a cross-border business: an agency with overseas clients, an e-commerce brand paying foreign suppliers, a marketplace, or any company where money regularly changes currency. For them the 0.5% FX and free local payouts save more than any monthly fee costs, and consolidating the bank, the FX broker and the payout tool into one account is worth real time. Sitting on the free Explore tier, a small global business gets most of that for nothing.
Skip it if you operate in a single currency and sell domestically. A US-only shop taking US-only cards gains little here and would find the 4.30% international-card rate and the multi-currency machinery irrelevant; Stripe or a domestic business account like Mercury is the simpler, cheaper fit. And if pure card acceptance is your entire need, a dedicated processor will usually undercut Airwallex on rate.
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