Since their inception, Airwallex has relied on collaboration platform, Slack, and its external communication function, Slack Connect, to work seamlessly with third parties. The company sees it as a vastly superior approach to communicating compared to old school emails.

“We set up Slack Connect even before we sign a contract with a partner. Once we get to the point of designing a solution, we establish a channel and invite different teams into it, which helps our customers and partners feel a much stronger connection to the Airwallex team.”

Since Slack channels are searchable, it’s easy for the team to find the messages, files, channels and people that they need.

For larger and more complex partnerships, such as those with Xero, Klarna, Shopify and Amazon Web Services, Airwallex has announcement channels, like #airwallex-xero, where the team shares big news items, launches and questions that are relevant to the entire group. The team also has more specialised channels for things such as joint PR announcements and product integrations.

Jumping hurdles

With 1000 staff across 19 offices, a central challenge for Airwallex is communicating across the organisation, with suppliers, vendors and customers located across the world.

“We couldn’t just jump on a plane to see everyone over the last two years. Zoom has been great - what would we have done without it?” says Rees.

“But it can be challenging trying to organise people from the US, Europe and Asia to get together on a call at the same time. So, as we’ve grown globally, we’ve tried to move to a more asynchronous communication setup,” Rees explains.

This approach lends itself to Slack, which supports multiple stakeholders within Airwallex to effectively communicate, collaborate and achieve results, no matter where they are located.

“We wanted to move away from infinite Zoom meetings, so people can work in their own time zones and in their own way,” Rees says.

Importantly, Slack supports Airwallex’s impressive growth trajectory. “With a global team, it’s not realistic to have a catch up at 9:00am every morning. Slack allows us to scale in a way so we can maximise our resources and support our team to achieve their full potential.”

“It’s really created efficiencies in how we communicate and allows us to work more effectively. I can check in first thing in the morning at 6:00 am when my dog wakes up, use it throughout the day and then go back in during the evening after I put the kids to bed. It really helps us to move projects forward,” says Rees.

Eye to the future

Airwallex has Slack channels for exploring ideas, collaborating and solving problems, and also takes full advantage of the ability to integrate other software platforms and applications into Slack, which has been a game changer. In the future, the company hopes to continue to build on these integrations with the goal of enabling as many of its applications as possible to talk to each other - integrating its Salesforce CRM solution into Slack, for example.

His advice for other businesses to get the most out of Slack is to implement simple guidelines at the start.

“You want to develop a shared understanding about how to use that channel – and how you use the channel changes all the time. During the implementation phase for a customer we use the channel to get really quick responses to questions where a time delay could have an impact on the launch date.

“Post launch, you need different mechanisms and Slack becomes an escalation path. You have to be quite explicit with customers and partners about how to use the medium.”

Airwallex continues to pursue ambitious goals and Rees says Slack will be instrumental to this. “We’ll evolve together as we conquer the world and beyond.”