Airwallex Innovation & Technology Culture

What types of products or services does your engineering team build? What problem are you solving for customers?

We’re creating an AI CFO for founders and small companies with AI automation for several services ranging from bookkeeping to payroll and eventually financial planning and analysis. One of the aspects of the CFO function we’re tackling is managing a company’s day-to-day finances, also known as bookkeeping. Traditionally, founders would either handle this themselves or hire someone part-time. It involves tracking all the money flowing in (for example, customer revenue through online checkout, invoices or wires) and all the money flowing out (such as expenses for salaries, rent, utilities) to ensure the company’s finances are accurate and up to date. We’re building intelligent algorithms that can understand these financial patterns and handle the nuances of accounting much like a human accountant.

Tell us about a recent project where your team used AI as a tool. What was it meant to accomplish? How did you use AI to assist?

My team uses AI to supercharge our smaller team with Cursor and Claude Code able to generate quick prototypes in the frontend, along with making our integrations with platforms easier. Also, MCP servers have been significantly useful in speeding up integrations with different tools. I used Ramp MCP servers to pull data from live customers and then tested a variety of machine learning models with HuggingFace MCP. After creating multiple pull requests, I used Graphite agents to review and evaluate code style and examine edge cases that I may have missed.

Lastly, when building out our platform, we relied heavily on AI to help us flesh out possible algorithms with Claude research. Using AI to iterate through these algorithms allowed us to evaluate trade-offs much faster. I went through several conversations with Claude to understand edge cases of the algorithms and with each changing requirement, the assistant could recommend reasonable suggestions. The research mode also provides citations for the papers, allowing me to read each one and draw my own conclusions.

What would that project have looked like if you didn't have AI as a tool to use? 

Finance and accounting are complex and nuanced fields with lots of rules, guidelines and judgment calls that companies have to make. There’s some flexibility in how you approach things, but you still need to stay within the boundaries of what’s allowed. Building AI-powered workflows for areas like this takes a lot of research to really understand which technologies and algorithms are best suited to handle all that complexity while making sure the finances are accurate.

One of the ways that AI is unique in empowering our workflow is that it can quickly assess what algorithms and technology are out there and break it down into categorization.This saves me hours of manual research and summarization. Also, all of the context that AI can synthesize and summarize means that I can quickly assess the pros and cons of different algorithm ideas that I have proposed. As we gather more requirements after talking to our design partners, we can then use the saved context to continue to iterate on these algorithms.

Although AI has some limitations, I primarily believe it changes my workflow by offloading menial testing and condenses the research I need to do to iterate through different designs.