Man, I gotta tell you, digging into Airwallex’s internal risk policies was a wild ride. It all started when a friend of mine, who runs a niche e-commerce business—selling stuff that’s maybe a little grey area, you know?—got his account locked faster than he could say “international transfer.”
The Dive into the ‘No-Go’ Zones
He was fuming. Said Airwallex just sent him some vague, boilerplate email about high-risk industries. So, I offered to help him figure out what the heck they considered high risk. I started where everyone starts: their public documentation. Didn’t tell me much, just the usual stuff like illegal activities, drugs, and terrorism financing. Duh.
I knew the real juice had to be somewhere deeper. I started reaching out to contacts. I spent a whole week just chatting with folks who had worked in compliance for various FinTechs, especially the ones focused on cross-border payments. It’s amazing what people will share when you offer to buy them a decent cup of coffee and frame it as a “market research project.”
My first breakthrough came from a guy who left Airwallex’s compliance team about a year ago. He was super cautious at first, only speaking generally about “enhanced due diligence sectors.” But after a few back-and-forths, I got him to spill the beans on the real internal blacklist—the stuff they won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, even if they’re technically legal.
Here’s what I managed to scrape together, piece by piece:
- Gambling and Regulated Gaming: This one is a massive headache for any payment provider. The compliance guy told me, “Unless you’re a massive, publicly traded casino with perfect global licensing, Airwallex just flags and declines.” The regulatory friction is just too high across different jurisdictions. I saw an internal memo snapshot he shared—it basically said, “If we have to check five different national laws to process a single payment, we lose money.”
- Unregulated Pharmaceuticals/Supplements: Not the big pharmacy chains, but the small online shops selling “magic pills” or unproven health supplements. Anything that skirts FDA/TGA/EMA approval is instantly high-risk. They lump in a lot of CBD operations here too, even where it’s legal, because the definitions change state-to-state.
- Adult Content and Services: This is a minefield. They differentiate between mainstream platform subscriptions (like a big streaming service) and anything involving live services, escort agencies, or content that might be borderline illegal in conservative regions. They just blanket-banned the latter to save themselves the headache of policing every upload.
- Cryptocurrency Exchanges (Specifically Unlicensed P2P): While Airwallex deals with some licensed crypto firms, they absolutely shut the door on peer-to-peer exchanges and smaller, unlicensed platforms. The money laundering risk is apparently huge, and their systems are trained to sniff out transactions that look like they’re flowing to or from known P2P wallets.
- Weaponry and Firearms (Even Legal Sales): Again, legally compliant businesses. But because the regulatory environment is so polarized—imagine trying to track gun sales between the US and Europe—they just avoid it. Less paperwork, fewer headaches with government regulators.
- Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) and Pyramid Schemes: This is an obvious one, but their internal rules are very broad. If a business model heavily relies on recruiting new distributors and making money off sign-up fees rather than pure product sales, it’s a hard stop. My source said they run sophisticated graph analysis to spot these structures.
Connecting the Dots for My Friend
Turns out, my friend’s niche e-commerce operation—selling imported traditional herbal remedies that didn’t have easy-to-verify certifications—fell directly into that “Unregulated Supplements” bucket. Even though he was operating legally in his country, the moment he started sourcing product from three different continents, Airwallex saw it as “too complex and too risky to verify legitimacy.”
The whole exercise taught me something crucial: when these platforms talk about “risk,” they aren’t just talking about breaking the law; they’re talking about minimizing the operational cost of compliance. If your business model requires their team to spend ten times the effort verifying transactions compared to a standard SaaS company, you’re going on the “High Risk” list, and they’ll politely (or not-so-politely) show you the door.
It was a proper rabbit hole, but at least my friend got his answer. He had to pivot to a local bank that was less spooked by cross-border complexity, even if their fees were higher. Sometimes, simple compliance costs more.