Circles partners with Airwallex to deliver embedded finance for telcos across 70+ countries

Source: PR Newswire

Circles and Airwallex today announced a strategic global partnership to integrate Airwallex’s industry-leading embedded finance solutions into CirclesX, Circles’ award-winning SaaS platform for telecom operators. This partnership opens a significant new growth opportunity, enabling telecom operators globally to increase customer lifetime value by offering a full suite of digital banking services or digibanking solutions across 70+ countries.

The CirclesX platform has seen rapid success over the past decade, helping telcos such as KDDI, e&, and AT&T launch market-redefining digital MVNOs across multiple markets in Asia and South America, while also transforming the end-to-end digital backbone for Telkomsel in Indonesia. The platform is renowned for driving industry-leading customer satisfaction and monetization for operators.

With FinX, the embedded financial services stack native to CirclesX, operators can seamlessly introduce a range of digital financial capabilities directly within their platforms, without the need to build or manage complex financial infrastructure, incur significant upfront costs, or navigate regulatory complexity on their own.

Powered by Airwallex’s global payments and financial infrastructure, FinX enables telcos to broaden their enterprise offerings by providing global payouts, travel cards, supplier payments, and expense management at best-in-class FX rates.

As globally, connectivity becomes increasingly commoditized, telecom operators must enhance their offerings to remain relevant to subscribers. CirclesX enables operators to leverage their unique strengths to play a deeper role in customers’ daily transactions, driving revenue growth through diversification and stronger retention. With FinX, operators can leverage existing KYC capabilities to unlock new transactional revenue streams from everyday payments and remittances, while increasing customer engagement and retention through high frequency digibanking use cases.

Awais Malik, chief growth officer, Circles, said: “At Circles, we’re continuously pushing the boundaries of innovation for the industry beyond just core telco products and we are confident that embedded financial products will power the next phase of revenue growth for telcos.

“With Airwallex’s fintech expertise, we’ve built a globally scalable financial services stack embedded in our platform, making it seamless for any telco organization to launch and scale financial products or services with zero licensing and infrastructure hassles.”

Airwallex is a leading global fintech platform that enables enterprises to embed licensed digital financial services and move money to more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. With over 80 licences and permits globally, and a strategic partnership with Visa, Airwallex provides the global financial infrastructure that allows telecom operators on the CirclesX platform to launch and scale digital financial services without building or managing complex banking infrastructure.

This global partnership reflects a shared ambition to bring embedded financial services to telecom operators worldwide, unlocking a new growth segment for Airwallex while enabling CirclesX customers to participate in financial flows at massive scale across millions of subscribers.

Arnold Chan, general manager, Asia-Pacific, Airwallex, said: “Telecom operators sit at the centre of their customers’ daily lives, but connectivity alone is no longer enough to drive long-term growth.

“By partnering with Circles and integrating with the CirclesX platform, we’re enabling operators to embed trusted, global financial services directly into their digital experiences – unlocking new revenue streams, deeper engagement and stronger customer lifetime value at scale.”

Circles’ consumer MVNO brand in Singapore, Circles.Life, is already seeing early success with two FinX-powered products: a semi-open wallet and a cashback card. The Circles.Life wallet, currently available in select channels, has driven 40% incremental subscriber growth by enabling easy wallet top-ups via PayNow and peer-to-peer transfers.

Also, Circles.Life offers one of Singapore’s leading cashback cards as part of its Zerofy cashback program. The program has delivered 5× growth in monthly transactions per user and a 10× increase in monthly spend, while also contributing to a 30-point year-on-year increase in customer NPS.

Circles will begin rolling out the FinX platform to existing CirclesX customers and other operators in the coming weeks.

Further reading: Airwallex integrates ClearBank’s agency banking solution