This is so stupid so I'm going to stop in a bit but one more time as you continue to smear me in public. We follow the law. You clearly don't understand it, or Airwallex. The statute you're citing applies to certain social-media and content-sharing applications, including TikTok. It does not designate every company with foreign investors a "foreign adversary controlled entity," and it contains no senior-executive test. You invented that part. Airwallex is an Australian-founded, U.S.-regulated financial services company. And even if we humor the Keith Random Threshold, we clear it: under 20% China ownership on the cap table, no global executives based there. You built a test, applied it to a statute it doesn't appear in, and we pass it anyway. The basic error running through all of this is that you are reading a contract as if it were a network diagram. The entity named in a set of terms is the one that owes the customer a legal obligation. It says nothing about where data lives. No US customer data is stored in Hong Kong. On roles we are not hiring global roles in China. I don't owe you an explanation on any of this but I feel like I have to set the record straight because you constantly spread fake news about us. And by the way a job title is not an access permission. Check your own footnotes while you're there. The entire role count rests on four listings. Three are archived links that do not resolve. The fourth is a man who has been based in Singapore for five years. Take the adjectives out of the letter and it describes any global payments company whose public documents have been scraped. Keep going if you like, anyone can gather published facts about a business operating across a hundred markets and arrange them into something ominous. It is not the same as being right. We've gone through it line by line, and the ownership figure alone is materially misstated. It was also addressed to the Treasury Secretary, not to us. None of it is new. Every one of these claims has been circulating in an opposition research memo for months, starting immediately after you launched your campaign against us on X. I have real respect for the Congressman and for the Committee's work. We have reached out, and I will keep engaging in Washington on these questions, as I have throughout. That is where they belong and that is where they get answered. I know you're very powerful, but you are not Washington, and I don't owe you a damn thing. And no I'm not going to debate you. I don't think you're honest and I don't think you argue in good faith so there's nothing to be gained from it.

Amazing how Keith keeps changing his story. When his unhinged conspiratorial rants began a year ago Airwallex was 40% Chinese-owned according to him (a lie). When the facts caught up with him he moved the goalposts. And notice that the personal attacks have stopped too? He no longer calls me a “CCP tool” or attacks my integrity now that people are paying attention. Keith also uses “Chinese investors” to make ordinary venture capital sound sinister. He means Sequoia. Nearly eight years ago, Steve Ji, a respected Midas List investor then based in Melbourne, approached an Australian founder and offered to lead a round in our startup. It was one of the best days of my life. Does Keith believe every founder backed by Sequoia in that era should now be punished? The world has changed, and we have responsibly evolved our cap table with it. Most of our investors (Greenoaks, Addition, Lone Pine, Salesforce Ventures, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, T.Rowe Price) are from the US, Australia and Europe. No global Airwallex executive is based in China. And his supposed “legal standard” is fiction. He literally doesn’t know what he is talking about. By Keith’s logic, dozens of Fortune 500 companies would be suspect simply because they employ senior regional executives in China. Airwallex does not even have a global executive based there. With regard to ownership, HSBC and other banks literally do business in the US. I respect Keith, I think he’s smart, you’d think he’d get off of X and just talk to me about this but he won’t because the smear must go on.

I hope @eglyman and @karimatiyeh are asking themselves if they are comfortable with politically connected investors in their company using a founder’s Chinese ethnicity and national-security as weapons against a competitor? @tryramp was valued at $44 billion just three months ago. Airwallex was valued at $11 billion. This is a company four times our valuation whose investors are using their political reach to turn a commercial rivalry into a Washington national-security fight. This is the anatomy of a smear campaign. Their investors have been attacking me and my company for months. This week a congressional letter about Airwallex is published and two of its most immediate and aggressive amplifiers are Ramp investors. What exactly are they afraid of? Airwallex spent ten years building global business accounts and financial infrastructure for companies operating around the world. Why not compete on the merits? Build the better product. Instead, Airwallex is being singled out for something utterly ordinary among global financial companies. Adyen has had a Shanghai team for more than a decade. PayPal, Checkout, JPM, Citi etc. many others operate in China to serve a global payments market. Why is the serious policy question not what security standards should apply to every global financial-services company? We welcome that question. We hired Coalfire, an A2LA-accredited FedRAMP Third-Party Assessment Organization, to independently evaluate our controls. Its published assessment described our security program as “intentional, structured, and forward-looking,” with controls that “go beyond minimum expectations.” We published the attestation. That should be the standard. Establish rigorous requirements for protecting American customer data. Independently test companies against them. Publish the results. Apply the same rules to Airwallex, Adyen, PayPal, Checkout and every other global financial company. The Committee’s letter itself says it “has not reached the conclusion that Airwallex has engaged in unlawful conduct.” There has been no finding of unlawful conduct here. Airwallex has instead opened its systems and controls to independent scrutiny. So why is Airwallex deserve to be on trial according to Ramp? I was born in China. I am an Australian citizen. My ethnicity is not evidence of allegiance to the Chinese government. It should not become a substitute for technical evidence simply because it makes an accusation more politically potent. National security is too important for that. Eric and Karim should ask whether this is really how they want competition in fintech to work. We have nothing to hide. We will keep answering legitimate questions, publishing evidence and subjecting ourselves to independent scrutiny. And after ten years building @airwallex, we are proud of what we actually compete on which is helping businesses operate and win globally.

After working with @JTLonsdale dating back to 2008, it's personally disheartening that his interests in competitive firms result in unwarranted propaganda towards @airwallex. After 11yrs at @PalantirTech, I joined @awxjack in Melbourne in 2020, and we've since been on a mission to empower businesses to operate across borders. Global finance is a a complex environment, requiring careful attention to regional regulatory requirements, data isolation, and system integrity. Airwallex approaches this complexity seriously, and with pride, just as Palantir did with sensitive government environments.

I’m a founder. I like to focus on engineering and building rather than responding to false allegations. But there is so much here that I had to say something. I was born in China, and I am a proud Australian citizen who immigrated there as a teenager. Australia gave me the freedom and opportunity to build this company. The United States represents that same promise more powerfully than anywhere else on earth. Having employees in China is not, by itself, a security issue. The question is how customer data is protected. Joe knows that many of the world’s largest payments, banking and technology companies have employees and operations in China. What matters is the architecture, controls and safeguards governing access to data. Our controls have been independently assessed, and our product and security teams include veterans of Palantir and the Australian Defence Force. These allegations did not originate with a security breach or regulatory finding. They originated with investors in Ramp, our direct competitor. We have written to the Congressman and look forward to answering his questions. You can read the correspondence here:

We started @Airwallex because operating globally was way harder than it needed to be. Ten years later, @mandala_econ estimates Airwallex supported $4.6B in economic benefits for Australia in 2025.

We started @Airwallex because operating globally was way harder than it needed to be. Ten years later, @mandala_econ estimates Airwallex supported $4.6B in economic benefits for Australia in 2025.

I have written this before but good to repeat it. Global financial infrastructure has, for most of history, been a privilege of scale. Only large enterprises could afford the banking relationships, FX desks, and compliance teams to operate globally in multiple countries. As AI creates more businesses that go global from day one not having access to this kind of infrastructure is a tax on growth. We built @airwallex to change that. 🌎

Compete globally. Grow locally. @Airwallex is built to help businesses compete and win around the world, so they can bring the benefits of that growth home through jobs, investment and economic activity. Our agentic global business account is the next step. 🌎

The asset may move globally but the moment money needs to enter the real economy you are back to local currencies, local payment systems and local regulation. That’s why I’m glad @dankimxyz is here thinking deeply about where stablecoins genuinely improve the financial stack rather than treating them as a replacement for it. They are a powerful new rail especially as agents begin transacting at machine speed. The future is not borderless finance. It is global finance built to work across borders.

I like this. A "Borderless Founder" understands that in practice borders matter more than ever. Founders who learn to build across countries early will have an advantage. Specifically learning how to operate outside your home market before your competitors is key. This was our head start as an Aussie team. The internet made the world more global and AI may make it far more productive but neither will repeal the state. Founders who develop a healthy respect for sovereign borders and learn to build across them rather than pretend they don’t exist will have an edge.

A little bit of Melbourne landed in Sydney☕️ If you were heading to a certain “Tour” at the ICC yesterday, you might have noticed @airwallex along the way. We took over a café and Darling Harbour with one simple message: Aussie-born. Globally built. From a coffee and a currency problem in Melbourne to 600,000+ businesses around the world. Not a bad Tour!