Markets
Airwallex-Commissioned Study Says It Added $4.6B To Economy
A new report paid for by Airwallex claims its platform added AUD $4.6 billion to the Australian economy in 2025, mostly through savings for small businesses. T
Airwallex, the Melbourne-founded payments platform, says its Australian small business customers are collectively better off by AUD $4.6 billion a year, and that the average small or medium business (SMB) on its platform captures around $200,000 in annual benefits compared with businesses that don't use it.
The figures come from economic modelling by Mandala Partners, an independent research firm Airwallex paid to study its own impact. The findings, based on 2025 data, were published last Friday, 18 September.
Why this matters to your business, not just the economy
Strip away the billion-dollar headline number and the report's real claim is about time and fees. It says the typical Australian SMB using Airwallex saves $13,400 a year on foreign exchange conversion, bank fees and admin costs, and gets back 12.4 hours a week that used to go on financial paperwork.
That's roughly a day and a half of work reclaimed every week, according to the company. For a sole trader or small team, that's the difference between chasing invoices at 9pm and actually having a weekend.
The report also says SMBs on the platform grew revenue 13 per cent a year, four percentage points ahead of businesses that don't use it, and that export revenue among Airwallex's Australian SMB customers went from $2.3 billion in 2021 to $14 billion in 2025 — a sixfold jump.
What is Airwallex, and what did this study actually measure?
Airwallex is a fintech company, not a bank, that lets businesses hold multiple currencies, pay overseas suppliers, issue cards and manage international transactions from one account. It launched in Melbourne in 2015 and now says it serves more than 675,000 businesses worldwide.
"Economic modelling" here means Mandala Partners combined three things: Airwallex's own platform data, a survey of Australian businesses (both customers and non-customers), and Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, to estimate how much better off Airwallex users are than similar businesses that aren't on the platform. It's an estimate, built partly on a company's own data and a paid commission, not an audited or government-verified figure.
How Airwallex got here
Founded by four University of Melbourne graduates in 2015, Airwallex has grown into a global operation holding more than 85 financial licences across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, with over 2,300 staff across 27 offices.
What the report measured
Mandala calculated the AUD $4.6 billion figure as roughly 2 per cent of the entire Australian tech sector's contribution to GDP in 2025. It also found around $1.1 billion of the benefit, one dollar in every four, flowed to regional, rural and remote Australia rather than major cities.
What's changed for exporters
The sixfold jump in SMB export revenue, from $2.3 billion to $14 billion since 2021, is the number Airwallex is using to argue it's helping small businesses sell overseas, not just cut costs at home.
Perspectives
James Teodorini, Airwallex's Head of Australia and New Zealand, framed the numbers as evidence of a productivity fix: "Australia's productivity challenge comes down to helping businesses do more with the time, people and capital they already have," he said, adding that reclaiming 12 hours a week is "enormous" for a small business.
Amit Singh, Managing Partner at Mandala Partners, said the impact of platforms like Airwallex "goes well beyond simply improving financial transactions," pointing to the regional spread of the benefit as evidence it's not just a capital-city story.
Neither voice is independent of the report's outcome — one is the company being measured, the other is the firm it paid to measure it. The wider picture from official data is more cautious. Australia's labour productivity was flat in the December quarter of 2025 and rose just 1 per cent over the year, reversing a 1 per cent fall the year before, and productivity growth remains below its long-term average, according to the Productivity Commission's most recent bulletin. The Reserve Bank downgraded its assumption for trend productivity growth from 1 per cent to 0.7 per cent in August 2025, reflecting years of underperformance the Airwallex report itself references but doesn't independently resolve.
What's next
Expect the $4.6 billion figure to show up in Airwallex's own marketing and possibly in political debate about productivity, given how directly it lines up with the government's current productivity push. It won't be independently re-tested unless a government body, university or rival firm runs its own numbers.
If you run a small business, the useful move isn't taking the $200,000 average at face value. It's checking your own FX fees, bank charges and hours spent on admin against what a platform switch would actually save you, since averages from a vendor-funded study won't match every business.