The Slack evolution: from conversations to where we work
Airwallex was started in 2015 when four friends running a coffee shop in Melbourne’s Docklands found themselves frustrated by the hefty FX fees on their imports.
This frustration sparked an idea, and in less than a decade, Airwallex has grown into a global financial platform that’s making life easier for over 100,000 businesses, reaching unicorn status with a USD 5.6 billion (AUD 8.3 billion) valuation.
Airwallex’s founders were driven to provide a smarter way to do business across borders, a philosophy that extended to how they set up operations: on Slack and Salesforce. Working on Slack from the start, Airwallex was one of Slack’s first customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Over the years, Slack quickly became more than just a tool for engineers or a place for conversations. It evolved into the central workspace for the entire company, including the leadership team
“Slack has shifted from being just a chat tool to becoming the centre of the world at Airwallex. We don’t use email internally at all anymore,” says Cam Smith, Head of Engineering at Airwallex.
Today, with over 1,500 employees spread across 23 offices, Slack is integrated with Airwallex’s Salesforce CRM apps and has become a single source of truth, housing essential business processes and content.
Slack is more than just a communication platform at Airwallex — it’s how they work.
Slack has shifted from being just a chat tool to becoming the centre of the world at Airwallex. We don’t use email internally at all anymore.
Slack Connect brings global customers and teams together
Fast and clear communication is a non-negotiable when working with customers. But traditional methods like email and phone calls can slow down relationship-building and project implementations, especially when they involve teams spread across different time zones.
Slack Connect has completely transformed how Airwallex engages with its customers.
Now, teams from multiple countries can collaborate in secure Slack Connect channels for rapid communication and stronger collaboration.
“We now communicate solely in Slack with our customers — they’d rather connect by Slack than email or phone call,” says Nathan McNally, Head of Key Account Management Team at Airwallex.
When Airwallex worked on a major project with Paramount Liquor, they spun up dedicated Slack channels for each project phase — including channels for deal flow, implementation, and ongoing support — bringing together the relevant teams spread across six countries.
“Rather than waiting for a meeting or an email, a quick Slack message to a customer gets a response within a minute,” says McNally.
It’s a faster, more transparent way of working for everyone.
Slack speeds up sales velocity to close deals faster
As well as speeding up project implementation, Slack Connect has significantly shortened Airwallex’s deal cycles.
By moving conversations from cluttered email threads into Slack, deal closure times have been reduced from months to weeks.
“The direct and immediate communication via Slack Connect accelerates our deal processes dramatically,” says McNally
Salesforce has long supported Airwallex’s sales growth, and according to Huw Griffiths, Head of Enterprise ANZ at Airwallex, the #1 AI CRM is even more powerful when integrated with Slack.
“Salesforce is an amazing tool for any growing sales business, particularly when it comes to lead qualification — there’s nothing that does it better. Combined with Slack’s speed and visibility, we can act on data and close deals at a whole new level of efficiency and effectiveness,” says Griffiths.
Airwallex is also enthusiastic about the potential of Slack Sales Elevate and the integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud to keep the commercial team moving fast, even when they’re catching up between meetings and on the road.
“Staying up to date with how deals are moving and closing on my phone via Slack mobile app — that is incredibly powerful for me,” says McNally.
Salesforce is an amazing tool for any growing sales business, particularly when it comes to lead qualification — there's nothing that does it better. Combined with Slack’s speed and visibility, we can act on data and close deals at a whole new level of efficiency and effectiveness.
Centralised incident management and support
When it comes to handling incidents and internal support, timeliness and transparency are key. Slow responses to external and internal issues can be a point of frustration for customers and employees.
That’s why Airwallex has centralised its support processes in Slack.
Now, when an incident alert comes through, Slack integrations with Airwallex’s incident management tools automatically create a numbered Slack channel.
In the dedicated channel, engineers can collaborate in real-time, jump into a quick Slack huddle to problem-solve, and even run postmortems to learn from each incident.
“The benefit of managing incident responses in Slack channels is twofold: everyone can come together quickly to solve the problem, and there’s a searchable history log to reflect on,” explains Smith.
Airwallex is also managing its internal support in Slack. Employees can easily submit tickets through a conversational Slack bot that’s integrated with Jira.
“Slack provides a friendly interface for employees to submit requests quickly, without leaving the platform where they work,” says Smith.
He adds that another benefit of keeping support in Slack is the data it provides.
“Slack gives us great data on the questions being asked, so we can be more proactive in solving them.”
Smith is also excited about the potential of Slack AI to make it even faster for employees to get answers to common questions, drawing on the knowledge base Airwallex has built on Slack.
Proactive insights and summaries from Slack AI
After over ten years on Slack, Airwallex has created an impressive 16,000 active and archived channels.
With so much company and customer information stored on Slack, it’s no surprise that the team performed 345,000 Slack searches in just 28 days.
While Slack’s search function has been a go-to for quickly pulling up past conversations and files, a few new Slack AI capabilities are making it even easier to find relevant information.
“I always open Slack in the morning to see what’s going on. When I first saw the Slack AI summary I was amazed,” says McNally
Channel summaries and recaps surface insights proactively, making it faster to get across cases, deals, and projects, and preventing things from getting lost.
“The new Slack AI features will make our Airwallex team super productive and simplify our conversations and channels,” says McNally.
The new Slack AI features will make our Airwallex team super productive and simplify our conversations and channels.
