Wise

Airwallex: Payments Will Become Invisible, Says Tom Sellin

Airwallex, the Australian fintech, is accelerating its European expansion and positioning itself as the financial infrastructure for an emerging era of AI-driven, agentic commerce. In a Finance Forward podcast interview, Tom Sellin — Head of Growth DACH at Airwallex — said that payments will become "completely invisible" within the next three years as AI agents handle checkout on users' behalf. Airwallex, founded in Melbourne in 2015 by Jack Zhang and last valued at about $12 billion, has reserved more than $1 billion for expansion across Europe, the Middle East and Africa through 2030 and plans to invest €31 million in Germany. The company aims to compete with established payment providers such as Wise, Stripe and Adyen.

Binance Exits EU as MiCA Rules Take Effect

On 1 July 2026 the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regime took effect, forcing most crypto firms without a MiCA licence to leave the EU — including Binance, which failed to secure approval. Competitors such as Bitpanda, OKX and Bitvavo are marketing aggressively to capture displaced customers. Separately, Australian payments firm Airwallex raised $320 million in new funding at an $11 billion valuation and is planning major expansion in Europe, the Middle East and Africa with Tom Sellin leading efforts in Germany. Michael Saylor's Strategy announced a corporate "Bitcoin monetization" program of up to $1.25 billion after selling 32 Bitcoin in May. The newsletter also notes the end of Payment-for-Order-Flow revenue streams on 1 July and reports governance and hiring moves at banks and fintechs (N26 supervisory board additions, Nord-Ostsee Sparkasse leadership hire).

Tone-of-voice guides unfit for the AI era

Dan Ramirez argues that traditional tone-of-voice guides — static documentation built for human-paced marketing — are inadequate as AI accelerates content production across channels. He proposes 'Brand Language Architecture': a governable, structured system that encodes brand meaning, rules and accountability so AI and tools can reliably produce on-brand language. Ramirez warns that tooling vendors (he cites Adobe's Brand Intelligence and Brivvy) are racing to enforce brand voice but often assume a formally defined source of brand language; without that, brands risk drift or vendor lock-in. He offers five diagnostic tests (departure, five-people, catch-after, prompt, accountability) to assess readiness and urges organisations to build owned language systems before tools do it for them. Ramirez is founder of Rule of Three, a practice that builds governed language systems for large organisations.