‘What the eff?’: Jack Zhang on Airwallex’s near-death experience

It’s 5.30am in Singapore on March 10, 2023. Jack Zhang gets up in his hotel room, looks at his phone and realises something is wrong. As the founder of Airwallex, a financial technology scale-up with 1400 staff in 20 offices around the world, Zhang is accustomed to a busy WhatsApp inbox. But he has dozens of missed calls and unread messages. From a quick glance, they seem to all be about Silicon Valley Bank.

Wiping his eyes, Zhang groggily recalls that Airwallex had earlier that week parked some of its balance sheet cash with the Californian institution. SVB is in danger of collapsing? How much do they have in there? About $US100 million? Zhang calls his chief financial controller in the Netherlands to find out, and is wide awake when he gets the answer – $US345 million ($543 million). It’s more than a third of the $US902 million that Airwallex has raised across five venture capital rounds in its eight-year history.