Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 46. Published 7 May 2026. Guest: Tom Sellin, Airwallex. Host: Lars Markull. Recorded live at FIBE in Berlin.
Lars Markull: Tom Sellin has a way of explaining how Airwallex's embedded finance offering works. He uses a Lego set. You have all the individual pieces, wallets, cards, payouts and FX, and the platform or fintech company on the other side decides what they want to build. A small car, a rocket ship, just one piece if that is all they need. The point is that you're not buying a finished product, you are choosing which building blocks to plug into your own.
Tom is the first person on the ground building Airwallex in Germany. Overall the company has 26 offices, 85 licences, and infrastructure that already powers companies like Moss and Navan. His job is to make sure German platforms and fintech companies know that infrastructure exists and can access it.
In this episode we get into how the embedded finance layer actually works, who is already using it and why, and what the build versus buy decision looks like when you need to move money across 150 countries without spending 18 months getting a licence.
This episode was recorded live at FIBE, the fintech Berlin conference, where Tom and I sat down in between sessions to have this conversation.
My name is Lars Markull and I'm the founder of Embedded Finance Review. Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. And if you're exploring an embedded payments, banking or lending product for your platform or service, I offer free intro calls where I share honest feedback and connect you with the right providers and partners. Sounds interesting? You can book a call at embeddedfinancereview.com. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Tom, welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast, live here at FIBE. How are you doing today?
Tom Sellin: I'm fine, thanks Lars. And thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here, and obviously it's quite a different setting. It gives a lot of energy being surrounded by people here at FIBE as well.
Lars Markull: Exactly. I can look out here of the tiny space seeing other people walking past and listening to our conversation here.
Payleven, PayPal, Clearpay
Lars Markull: Tom, we're going to talk a lot about Airwallex today, obviously talking about the company's product offering, but also specifically the embedded finance angle. But before we do that, maybe we dive a little bit into your background. Famously Steve Jobs once said you can only connect the dots when you look back. Most recently you've taken on the role of leading growth here in the German, the DACH market, for Airwallex. If you look back at your past career steps, what was there that made you ready for this position?
Tom Sellin: Yeah, so I would say there are three steps that brought me to this point. I started my career 14 years ago at the Rocket venture called Payleven, that was later sold to SumUp. And actually I was the first person in the sales team, selling a point of sale solution. So we went door to door trying to sell our POS solution to restaurants and trying to convince them to actually accept card payments, when I would say cash payment was still predominant. Or we were at Tegel Airport trying to convince taxi drivers and giving out these card readers. So that was actually 14 years ago, quite some time.
I think the second step was definitely my PayPal time. So I was five and a half years at PayPal. I joined there as an account executive and I was really surprised by the power of the PayPal button, or PayPal as a wallet itself, before PayPal also decided to expand into the platform space. So PayPal acquired a company called Braintree that was incorporated into the PayPal organisation. And after one year being at PayPal, someone approached me and asked me, would you be willing to take over responsibility for Braintree in DACH and actually build the whole go-to market strategy there?
While the platform piece was still fairly under-covered, Braintree was very well known internationally, but in Germany they were really struggling to get a hold because they were predominantly focused on cards. We built up the whole team there. We won the first customers, like Zooplus for example. We built up the whole go-to market strategy there. Looking back, obviously you could make a whole podcast episode about PayPal and where it is today, but it's actually quite interesting that they struggled to incorporate all these different products, Hyperwallet, Braintree, PayPal, into one product now.
And I think the last step before joining Airwallex was my time at Clearpay. So I took the role as a country manager there, also the first person on the ground again. Localisation, passporting the licence from the Bank of Spain to the German regulator, building up the team there, and later I also took the responsibility for the whole commercial structure within the EU as well, where I really went into the aspects of go to market, regulation, risk and all these different aspects.
Why Germany, and why now
Lars Markull: And now with Airwallex you're obviously working with a company that's massive on an international fintech scale. I think I just read another news article about your company yesterday, and what was mentioned, there are 26 offices worldwide holding 85 licences. That's a massive beast for sure. However, here in Germany the brand, if I walk around here and ask a few people, of course they know Airwallex, but it's maybe not the household name as it would be at other fintech conferences. So what made you make the switch of saying, yes, this is definitely the kind of company I want to push in the German market?
Tom Sellin: Yeah, it's interesting. From a personal perspective it's really the breadth of the platform, and I think we are going a little bit deeper into that as the podcast goes on. I've been selling point of sale solutions, I've been on the payment side, I've been a little bit also working with spend solutions. But Airwallex really combines all these different products into one financial operating system. And that makes it so interesting, because you have this global infrastructure with almost 3,000 employees, the company exists for like 10 years, you have all these 26 offices around the world, but in Germany no one knows about it actually. So probably it changes now, but it's actually quite an interesting opportunity.
Lars Markull: Yes, and we heard it from many people who have taken over roles at German companies, being the first German person on the ground for an international fintech. There's always a lot of education that needs to happen internally. I just spoke to somebody who wasn't able to buy his dinner yesterday because he didn't have cash with him at the Berlin place. Maybe let's not talk too much about the cash aspect. But in your couple of months now in the role, being the German guy so to say for Airwallex, did you already find yourself in the position that you need to educate the people at headquarters about the German specifics in fintech?
Tom Sellin: Yeah, it's interesting. I've seen also other fintechs or other SaaS companies when they want to expand to Germany, and obviously, yeah, it's Germany, it's one of the largest economies of the world, we need to expand there and we need to have a presence there. So what are we going to do? Let's put a salesperson in the market, let's try to get them to sell the products. And then obviously after four to five months when no deal closes, they think, okay, what's going to happen? Let's do the pipeline review, we don't see the deals emerging. And you ask yourself, okay, why am I not making any progress in that market?
And usually what people underestimate is that obviously you have to really get it right. You cannot cut corners. You actually have to get what I call minimum viable localisation. You have to take a look at, well, how does Germany actually function? What are the requirements? You have to take a different stance from a regulatory perspective. So there are so many different aspects about it. People always argue, Germany's a different market. Yeah, but it is. It can work, but obviously you have to invest before and have to take a closer look at how it would work.
Minimum viable localisation
Lars Markull: Are there one or two specific things in terms of product features that are very German specific for Airwallex?
Tom Sellin: So I would say, if we start more from a culture perspective and then move to product components or product features, I would say it's very surprising that we have a house bank culture, we call it the Hausbank. So when I was 14 my parents went with me to the bank, which was maybe a street or two away, and I opened a bank account in my name. And then obviously you stick with a bank for decades. And I think it's quite surprising for people looking at Germany that people tend to stick with their house bank for quite some time. You need a lot of trust, you need a lot of education. The pain point needs to be quite big for them to be able to change their bank.
And then in terms of looking closer at what I call minimum viable localisation features, especially on the accounting side, DATEV. It's actually quite interesting, if a tax advisor doesn't like the solution, and if it's not properly integrated, so you can get the data out of the operating system, the tax advisor will highly likely say no. And I've seen that on the payment side, deals failing while an accounting department or tax advisor says, okay, we cannot properly integrate. Germany's not working without a DATEV connection, that's for sure.