Jennifer Epstein

Among SMBs on @airwallex (reminder we cover markets around the world not just US) those paying for AI tools in Q3'25 grew processed volume 54% over the next year. Non-adopters: 29%. They also trade with 2.7x more countries (8 vs 3). Correlation, not causation. But AI may turn out to be a growth story, not just a cost story.

You can read more about our event in Canberra here: theairwallexeconomy.substack…

I hope @eglyman and @karimatiyeh are asking themselves if they are comfortable with politically connected investors in their company using a founder’s Chinese ethnicity and national-security as weapons against a competitor? @tryramp was valued at $44 billion just three months ago. Airwallex was valued at $11 billion. This is a company four times our valuation whose investors are using their political reach to turn a commercial rivalry into a Washington national-security fight. This is the anatomy of a smear campaign. Their investors have been attacking me and my company for months. This week a congressional letter about Airwallex is published and two of its most immediate and aggressive amplifiers are Ramp investors. What exactly are they afraid of? Airwallex spent ten years building global business accounts and financial infrastructure for companies operating around the world. Why not compete on the merits? Build the better product. Instead, Airwallex is being singled out for something utterly ordinary among global financial companies. Adyen has had a Shanghai team for more than a decade. PayPal, Checkout, JPM, Citi etc. many others operate in China to serve a global payments market. Why is the serious policy question not what security standards should apply to every global financial-services company? We welcome that question. We hired Coalfire, an A2LA-accredited FedRAMP Third-Party Assessment Organization, to independently evaluate our controls. Its published assessment described our security program as “intentional, structured, and forward-looking,” with controls that “go beyond minimum expectations.” We published the attestation. That should be the standard. Establish rigorous requirements for protecting American customer data. Independently test companies against them. Publish the results. Apply the same rules to Airwallex, Adyen, PayPal, Checkout and every other global financial company. The Committee’s letter itself says it “has not reached the conclusion that Airwallex has engaged in unlawful conduct.” There has been no finding of unlawful conduct here. Airwallex has instead opened its systems and controls to independent scrutiny. So why is Airwallex deserve to be on trial according to Ramp? I was born in China. I am an Australian citizen. My ethnicity is not evidence of allegiance to the Chinese government. It should not become a substitute for technical evidence simply because it makes an accusation more politically potent. National security is too important for that. Eric and Karim should ask whether this is really how they want competition in fintech to work. We have nothing to hide. We will keep answering legitimate questions, publishing evidence and subjecting ourselves to independent scrutiny. And after ten years building @airwallex, we are proud of what we actually compete on which is helping businesses operate and win globally.

Are @tryramp employees proud of this obvious smear? is this how they want to compete?

I’m a founder. I like to focus on engineering and building rather than responding to false allegations. But there is so much here that I had to say something. I was born in China, and I am a proud Australian citizen who immigrated there as a teenager. Australia gave me the freedom and opportunity to build this company. The United States represents that same promise more powerfully than anywhere else on earth. Having employees in China is not, by itself, a security issue. The question is how customer data is protected. Joe knows that many of the world’s largest payments, banking and technology companies have employees and operations in China. What matters is the architecture, controls and safeguards governing access to data. Our controls have been independently assessed, and our product and security teams include veterans of Palantir and the Australian Defence Force. These allegations did not originate with a security breach or regulatory finding. They originated with investors in Ramp, our direct competitor. We have written to the Congressman and look forward to answering his questions. You can read the correspondence here: