Airwallex uses own IT as quality benchmark

Airwallex is aiming for its internal IT and security tools to set a high bar for quality and efficacy that is then replicated and reflected in the way its customer-facing services are built. 

Vice president of information security and IT Elliot Colquhoun told the iTnews Podcast that the company wanted to “inspire our employees to build really great products for our customers, referencing what we do internally.” 

Melbourne-born Airwallex is a fintech that’s achieved ‘unicorn’ status - defined as a valuation in excess of $1 billion - by providing a way for businesses to manage payments in multiple currencies. 

Colquhoun cites a friend’s saying, that “the quality of your internal tools determines the quality of your external tools”, as an idea that Airwallex has taken onboard. 

“It’s very true, and it's often not intuitive when you join a company,” he said.  

Colquhoun uses authentication as an example of the kind of experience that service providers want to get right in their own products. 

If a product team works at an organisation where authentication and sign-on to internal systems is sub-optimal, he argues - for example, where employees are subjected to numerous or inconsistently applied authentication challenges  - it’s clear that a low bar for quality of experience is being set. 

“[If] this is something that is impacting every employee in the organisation every day, [then] over time they subconsciously start to use your internal tools as the bar for quality, because that's just what they're using, and then they start to hold themselves to their bar when they build products,” Colquhoun said. 

“They say, ‘We should at least make it as good as what we have internally’.” 

Colquhoun said Airwallex’s approach is one of openness, where internal information security and IT not only set a good systematised example, but make themselves available to employees to discuss design and configuration choices. 

“We do deep-dives, we talk about the different factors that we incorporate - how we do device checking and risk-based analysis when logins occur,” Colquhoun said. 

“We also talk about the different strengths and weaknesses of the approach that we've taken, and we explain how we've put all this time and effort into fine-tuning our authentication policies to build a really great user experience that means that login windows popup relatively infrequently, error messages are really clear about what is actually going wrong, and that show we’re aiming to build a really high quality product internally. 

“[If you do that], what you’ll find is that your product managers, your engineers, the people that are using your tools but also building the tools for customers, start to hold themselves to a higher bar, because they have this internal reference. 

“And so you see an improvement in the quality of the product that you build externally as a result.”