Partnership Between Global Payments Platform Airwallex and Fintech Startup Pipe Boost Embedded Finance

With the stroke of a pen Airwallex struck a new partnership with fintech startup Pipe that gives it the ability to reach international markets in less than six weeks. The collaboration will pair Airwallex’s global reach with Pipe’s innovative embedded finance solutions, which bring user-friendly financial tools into the software that businesses and their customers use every day.

The move is just one in a series of strategic partnerships and acquisitions advancing an overarching trend in finance for 2025—the meteoric rise of embedded finance and the banking-as-a-service (BaaS) model.

The partnership exemplifies a continuing shift in the financial services industry, where digital banking is increasingly becoming an integrated utility in non-financial platforms. Known as embedded finance, this model involves the invisible integration of financial services like offering instance financing options at checkout or integrating insurance coverage in travel and ride-sharing apps.

In other words, instead of being mere destinations, banks are becoming utilities are made available at the customer’s point of need. Traditional financial institutions, in order to keep up with new customer demands, are heavily investing in embedded finance technologies by licensing out their own regulated technology stacks out to third-party companies via APIs. Fintechs themselves are helping bridge the gap between the roles of incumbents and the ever-growing expectations of today’s customers.

For Pipe, the goal is to enable third-party software platforms serving SMBs to unlock revenue potential through embedded financial tools. The partnership with Airwallex gives them access to that API-first infrastructure, enabling secure and efficient management of payouts across currencies to small businesses. For Airwallex, the most direct advantage is financial, given Pipe’s status as a high-growth fintech. It also serves as a clear validation of the burgeoning embedded finance market and a public success story of Airwallex’s ability to demonstrate its speed, reliability, and global reach.

The move is also indicative of a broader re-bundling of financial services by technology platforms and major brands, rather than traditional banks themselves. Nonetheless, the advancement of embedded finance does introduce some unique challenges. While having financial services integrated in the apps that consumers and businesses use every day offers unrivalled convenience, it introduces a great deal of complexity under the surface—such as extended underwriting, regulatory challenges, recalibration of risk, and extensive customer experience design. That’s why partnerships like Airwallex and Pipe are vital for building and scaling products that securely use technology to connect businesses to capital.