How Airwallex automated global KYB and sole prop onboarding
of KYB and sole prop checks automated across global markets, eliminating manual review bottlenecks.
accuracy resolving beneficial ownership across multi-layered cross-border structures.
across US, EU, Hong Kong, Australia, and beyond through a single API.
Airwallex is a global financial platform for modern businesses, offering multi-currency accounts, cross-border payments, spend management, and embedded finance through a single proprietary infrastructure. Founded in Melbourne in 2015 and headquartered in Singapore with around 1,400 employees across 20 offices worldwide, Airwallex serves more than 100,000 customers including Brex, Navan, and SHEIN. The company has raised $1.58B from investors including Tencent, Sequoia Capital, Lone Pine Capital, DST Global, Salesforce Ventures, and Square Peg, most recently closing a $330M Series G in December 2025. Annual transaction volume processed through the platform reached over $235B in October 2025, with ARR expected to exceed $1B. At that scale, onboarding the long tail of global SMBs and sole proprietors is a hard, high-volume compliance problem.
The long tail of SMBs and sole props was unverifiable at scale
Onboarding businesses from the US, EU, Hong Kong, Australia, and dozens of other markets, Airwallex hit the limits of conventional KYB providers:
- Long-tail SMB coverage gaps meant many small businesses simply did not appear in the registry data sold by mainstream KYB vendors, blocking onboarding for legitimate customers.
- Sole proprietors fell outside standard KYB because most vendors are built around incorporated entities, forcing manual review for a large share of applicants.
- Fragmented multi-country registries across the US, EU, Hong Kong, Australia, and beyond required juggling several regional providers, each with different data quality and latency.
Direct-to-source registries with intelligent fallback
AiPrise partnered with Airwallex to automate KYB and document verification on a single global pipeline:
- Direct-to-source registry coverage across 200+ countries and 500+ business registries, reaching SMB data that off-the-shelf vendors typically miss.
- Multi-vendor fallback architecture that automatically retries across alternative sources when a primary registry has gaps, lifting auto-verification rates on the long tail.
- Sole proprietor verification built into the same flow as incorporated KYB, with identity, address, and business-activity checks unified under one decision.
- AI-driven document insights to parse incorporation, registration, and proof-of-address documents across languages and formats with minimal manual review.
Registry depth where other vendors fall short.
Airwallex needed a partner that could verify the businesses other KYB providers could not, especially long-tail SMBs and sole proprietors across multiple regulatory regimes. AiPrise's direct-to-source registry network and fallback mechanisms automate verification for exactly the segment where conventional vendors break down. The result is a global onboarding flow that scales with Airwallex's customer base instead of bottlenecking on its hardest cases.
With AiPrise, Airwallex automates 100% of KYB and document verification for SMBs and sole proprietors across global markets, with 98% UBO detection accuracy.
