Airwallex is about to take on Stripe and the rest of the payments industry — in the physical world

Airwallex, the Australian fintech that has spent a decade quietly building global payments infrastructure, is moving into in-person payments. The move deepens its rivalry with Stripe across the payments stack, and enables the startup to directly aim at Square and Adyen on one of the last major battlegrounds in financial technology. Airwallex is launching a point-of-sale product that it says does something its rivals’ offerings don’t: Allow businesses to accept in-person payments in multiple countries via a single platform, without onboarding local vendors in every market.