Case study · Cross-border PSP · multi-jurisdiction · 2026
Airwallex
Cross-border payments platform goes AI-native, every licence regime intact.
A 420-person APAC Operations org inside Airwallex embedded AI across merchant KYB, multi-currency reconciliation, AML investigations, card-program ops, and developer support — without weakening the answer to FCA, MAS, AFSL, or any other regulator.
At a glance
- 420Org headcount
- 8 weeksEngagement
- 22Pioneers
- 6Workflows
- 5Licences in scope
The brief
AI rollout where every workflow touches a different regulator's playbook.
Cohort
- C-level (COO, CRO, CCO)3
- Heads of Department9
- AI pioneers22
Drawn from Compliance, KYB, FX & Treasury, AML Investigations, Card Ops, Developer Support, and Platform Engineering — every output reviewed against the licence in the relevant jurisdiction before it shipped.
What the pioneers shipped
Six workflows tuned per licence regime, per region.
Merchant KYB & onboarding
Pulls registries across APAC + EU, screens UBOs, drafts the licence-specific onboarding pack. Compliance officer signs off before any merchant gets credentials.
Multi-currency reconciliation
Reconciles wallet balances, FX positions, and settlement files across 12+ currencies. Treasury reviews the exception queue, not every line.
AML investigation copilot
Clusters alerts per jurisdiction, drafts SAR narratives in the format the local FIU expects. Analyst reviews; MLRO signs and files.
Card-program operations
Categorises issuing exceptions, drafts cardholder responses, scores chargeback win-probability. Card-ops analyst signs every transaction-touching outcome.
Developer support copilot
Answers integration tickets with cited API logs and code samples. Tier-2 engineer adds the fix and sends — same SLA, half the queue.
Per-licence evidence packs
Quarterly evidence assembled in the format each regulator expects — FCA, MAS, AFSL, SEC and HK MA — without ten internal handoffs.
“Five regulators. Twelve currencies. One documented answer to every question they could ask.”
Impact · Year one
Outcomes leadership signed off on.
Merchant KYB cycle
−68%
From 6 days to under 2 days, across all in-scope licences.
Recon exception queue
−74%
Daily queue cleared in 90 minutes instead of half a day.
Business satisfaction
9.4 / 10
Post-engagement leadership review across the three sponsoring regulators in scope.
Why it didn't go off the rails
Cross-border discipline. No regulator surprised.
Per-licence data isolation
Every agent scoped to a single licensed entity, or aggregates with PII and commercial terms stripped. No leakage between FCA, MAS, AFSL, or any other regime.
No autonomous money movement
Agents draft transfers, refunds, and recon adjustments. A treasury or card-ops lead signs every transaction-touching outcome.
MLRO veto on AML pipelines
Every AML model, alert tier, and SAR template runs through the relevant MLRO before deployment — per jurisdiction.
Per-regulator evidence by default
Every workflow that produces a record produces it in the format the relevant regulator expects — same query, same documented answer, every time.
Where to start
Book an org assessment.
Ninety minutes, no slides.
We'll spend an hour with your leadership team mapping where AI creates the most leverage in your operation — and what an overlay would look like in practice.