Airwallex has evolved significantly over the past two years, bolstered by acquisitions, innovative new solutions — and ambitious leaders.
Adrian, a data science director, is one such leader who has been busy driving the global payments and financial platform’s growth. Since joining the company about two years ago, he has helped build its product data science and growth data science teams from the ground up, setting the organization up for continued success.
Adrian has witnessed the company reach major milestones, such as its recent acquisition of OpenPay, which added billing capabilities to the company’s core infrastructure and accelerated revenue workflows; a $300-million Series F investment; and an annual recurring revenue milestone of $900 million in August.
Amid all of these positive changes, Adrian has been focused on optimizing product performance, accelerating customer acquisition and more, building out strong and engaged teams rooted in a culture of ownership, autonomy, and trust.
Adrian isn’t just committed to the business’s success; he’s committed to the people, too.
“At Airwallex, you’ll be joining a team where you will have opportunities to drive direct business outcomes and accelerate your professional growth,” he said.
Learn more about Adrian’s work at Airwallex, some of the company’s greatest accomplishments so far, and what the team has planned for the future.
About Airwallex
Airwallex offers global businesses fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts and payments to spend management and embedded finance.
How Adrian Built Data Science at Airwallex
I’m a data science director based in Singapore, leading the product data science and growth data science teams, which are rapidly growing teams of 19 data scientists in both Singapore and Asia-Pacific, and we’re expanding the team in the United States. Over the past two years at Airwallex, I’ve built out both teams from scratch.
The product data science team has two main focuses. The first is driving product growth by producing science-driven insights and analysis that directly impact product decisions, leading to improvements in activation, expansion, cross-sell and retention; and optimizing product performance to ensure that our products are best-in-class. A key example of the latter is Optimize 360, Airwallex’s payments optimization initiative, where we deployed contextual bandits to optimize payments acceptance success rates for our customers. This directly led to sustained uplift in payments success rates and a ten-times increase in payments volume.
Meanwhile, the growth data science team focuses on accelerating customer acquisition via A/B testing and customer insights; optimizing our marketing investments through data-driven multi-touch attribution; media mix modeling and incrementality testing; and building an efficient lead conversion funnel with ML-driven lead routing and accurate enrichment models.
I’m also passionate about building a strong, engaged team at Airwallex and supercharging the professional growth of every team member. So, I invest a lot of effort into interviewing every candidate while maintaining a high bar for talent. Across the team, I’m also continually fostering a strong team culture of ownership, autonomy, and psychological safety.
“Across the team, I’m also continually fostering a strong team culture of ownership, autonomy and psychological safety.”
What Business Milestones Mark the Latest Growth Phase
Airwallex’s mission is to build the future of global banking.
Legacy systems are slow, fragmented, and costly. We’re changing that. With our own infrastructure, software, and AI, we’re creating a borderless, intelligent, real-time financial OS. We’re not riding the old rails — we’re building new ones — so entrepreneurs and modern businesses can launch and scale globally from day one. This is the future of global banking, and we’re building it now.
Earlier this year, Airwallex completed a $300 million Series F funding round at a $6.2 billion valuation, bringing total funding to more than $1.2 billion. The company announced it’s on track to hit $1 billion annualized revenue in 2025 alongside expanded investor participation, including Visa Ventures.
In Brazil, the company received a payment institution license; meanwhile, in Mexico, the company received approval to close its MexPago acquisition, positioning it to launch in Latin America’s largest markets. The company officially launched in New Zealand earlier this year and signed an agreement to acquire CTIN Pay in Vietnam, accelerating the company’s expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. Additionally, the company opened new offices in Paris, New York, and Toronto, established first hires in the United Arab Emirates, and moved to its permanent U.S. headquarters in San Francisco.
Earlier this year, the company became Arsenal FC’s exclusive finance software partner, supporting supplier payments, spend cards, expense management and gateway services for hospitality. The company also won a hat-trick at the Asia FinTech Awards 2025, earning accolades for “Banking Tech of the Year,” “Best Employer of the Year,” and “Director of the Year.”
In July 2025, the company launched Purchase Orders to unify procurement and bill pay workflow. The company also introduced Airwallex Pay, which offers instant B2B transfers within the network, scheduled conversions that lock foreign exchange rates for up to 90 days, and expanded local payment methods to include Venmo, Cash App, Pix and TWINT.
Additionally, the company enabled Discover’s Diners Club acceptance across multiple countries and launched Apple Pay/Google Pay and physical cards in Canada and New Zealand. It also scaled its Yield investment product beyond Australia, launching in Hong Kong and Singapore with more than $350 million funds under management, and prepared for rollouts in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States.
How the AI-First Vision Shapes Products and Careers
We’re further scaling and improving contextual bandits as a part of Optimize 360 to increase customer coverage with a higher level of performance and are developing AI agents that autonomously discover and propose optimization strategies for each product. We’re also further optimizing our marketing investments with a full suite of causal inference and machine learning approaches. We plan to develop accurate lifetime value estimation models to enable smart targeting of high-potential prospects.
Proof of Scale: Revenue and Client Growth
- $720 million in annualized revenue and $130 billion in annualized payments volume as of March 2025, with expectations to reach $1 billion annual recurring revenue in 2025
- $900 million in ARR and $200 billion in annualized transaction volume as of August 2025, with 13,372 new transacting clients in the second quarter and ~30 percent lower customer acquisition cost year over year
- Delivered strong APAC performance in 2024, with 83% revenue increase YoY by the third quarter and global revenue up by 73% YoY
We’ve experienced dramatic growth in the past two years, which has translated into several growth opportunities for the team. Individuals’ scope has been quickly expanding as they deliver results, and team members are becoming more “single-threaded,” driving company-level projects from end to end, which is relatively uncommon for most data scientists.
Why Jobseekers Can Build Long-Term Careers Here
Deep cross‑functional collaboration with product and engineering is now the norm, so all data scientists have the full business context and leverage to directly drive company-level outcomes. High performers are getting promoted as a reflection of their sustained impact, and new roles are opening up across the entire team, so every team member has the opportunity to own green field problem areas from day one.
“Deep cross‑functional collaboration with product and engineering is now the norm, so all data scientists have the full business context and leverage to directly drive company-level outcomes.”
We employ roughly 1,900 people across 26 offices worldwide, supporting resilience and local execution, and we support more than 160 local payment methods and wallets.
Airwallex obtained a rare Chinese payments license, becoming only the second foreign company to do so, underscoring our licensing strength in complex markets. Also, a Forrester study found that our embedded finance solution can deliver 237% ROI, faster market expansion and multi‑million savings for customers over three years.
We operate from a clear, shared data science model that defines our mission and first principles. It keeps us aligned as we scale. We review and evolve it together, so everyone has ownership. Our operating principles map directly to the model, ensuring our day-to-day decisions reflect company values.
We’re an AI‑first company, pushing the frontiers of product optimization by combining ML and AI solutions intelligently, with Optimize 360 being our flagship example. Being on the forefront of AI, we’re evolving the data science role to maximize our effectiveness in this new paradigm.
At Airwallex, we have a wide suite of products with a lot of synergy, so there are unique opportunities to globally optimize that horizontally across products instead of locally optimizing each product independently. We’re doubling down on data scientists’ unique roles in powering product-led growth and directly influencing product decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Adrian and what is his role at Airwallex?
Adrian is a Data Science Director based in Singapore, leading both the product data science and growth data science teams across Singapore, APAC, and expanding in the U.S.
What has he contributed toward Airwallex’s growth?
He led key technical initiatives like Optimize 360 (using contextual bandits to boost payments acceptance), built out data science capability, and optimized marketing, acquisition, and product metrics through ML models and experimentation.
What are some of Airwallex’s recent business milestones?
Airwallex closed a $300M Series F, reached $900 million in ARR, acquired OpenPay for billing capabilities, expanded globally (New Zealand, Latin America, etc.), and rolled out new product features like Airwallex Pay and Purchase Orders.
How does Adrian approach culture and team management?
He fosters a culture of ownership, autonomy, and psychological safety, emphasizes trust across the team, and encourages professionals to tackle projects end-to-end.
Why is Airwallex attractive for jobseekers or data scientists?
In this environment, data scientists get deep cross-functional collaboration, full business context, and opportunities to own greenfield projects that impact core company outcomes.
