Freight keeps the world's goods moving, yet the money behind those shipments still crawls. While logistics software has raced ahead, the payment systems underneath it remain fragmented, manual and slow — a mismatch Visa and Airwallex now want to close.

The two companies have agreed to develop embedded-finance solutions aimed squarely at freight and shipping platforms, betting that one of the most operationally tangled industries in commerce is ready for a payments overhaul built around how it actually works.

Two heavyweights, one messy industry

The partnership splits along each firm's strengths: Visa handles the commercial-payments layer while Airwallex supplies the cross-border plumbing.

On Visa's side, the contribution is expertise in commercial payments, acceptance strategy, risk management and solution design. Airwallex brings its embedded-finance toolkit, multi-currency infrastructure and global platform technology. Rather than dropping a generic payments product into logistics, the pair say they intend to shape solutions around the operational realities of freight — the kind of specialised, market-specific work a one-size-fits-all model tends to miss.

Alessandro Figueroa, who leads new verticals and partnerships for Visa's commercial solutions in Europe, frames freight as economically essential but stuck with payment processes that are broken up, manual and inefficient. As digital freight platforms scale, he argues, they need financial tools that slot into existing workflows without piling on complexity — and combining Visa's payments depth with Airwallex's technology is meant to bring those tools to market quickly.

Why freight's money moves too slowly

Digitisation has swept through logistics operations, but the financial systems supporting the sector have lagged well behind.

Freight businesses still wrestle with disjointed payment flows, drawn-out settlement cycles and the manual grind of document handling — each of which slows cash movement and drives up cost. The drag is especially steep in shipping, where a payment can take roughly 42 days on average to land with the invoicing company, and where processing and administrative overhead can swallow close to a fifth of total transportation costs.

Christos Chamberlain, Airwallex's general manager for the UK and Europe, casts the problem in blunt operational terms: money trapped while payments clear across borders is capital that should be funding the next shipment instead of stalling in transit. Reliability, he notes, is what freight reputations are built on — getting the container there on time, every time — and payments, in his view, should behave with the same precision.

Cash stuck clearing across borders is capital that should be paying for the next shipment, not idling in transit. — Airwallex, on freeing up working capital

Payments as a feature, not a bolt-on

The core idea is to embed financial capability directly inside freight products, so it stops being a separate step bolted on at the end.

In practice, that means logistics customers could manage costs, tap working capital when they need it and move money across borders from within the software they already use — payment becoming a built-in function of the freight platform rather than a disconnected process running alongside it. For the businesses on those platforms, the promise is smoother cash flow, less friction in cross-border trade and fewer manual handoffs.

Figueroa points to shifting expectations as the driver: as industries digitise, companies increasingly want financial services that fit naturally into the platforms and workflows already in place, rather than tools they have to bend their operations around.

A bet on vertical-specific finance

For both firms, freight is as much a strategic proving ground as a market opportunity.

The deal strengthens Visa's commercial-payments proposition in a vertical where embedded finance has obvious utility, and it signals a wider move toward designing around specific industries instead of leaning only on general-purpose payment tools. For Airwallex, the collaboration extends a platform strategy and deepens a relationship that already spans cross-border B2B payments — while giving it a chance to show its infrastructure can carry more specialised applications in complex B2B settings.

If it works, the payoff is a template: prove that embedded finance can be tuned to the quirks of one demanding industry, and the same playbook can be pointed at the next.