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The fintech firm raised US$320 million last month in a financing round that valued it at $11 billion. That makes Zhang’s 12% stake in the company worth $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.

For the now 41-year-old cofounder and CEO, working long hours for the past two decades is a badge of honor he proudly wears.

"For more than 20 years, I have worked an average of 100 hours per week," he told Tatler in 2025. "Last year, that was reduced to 80 hours. I have started to recognize the importance of health and the need to find a more sustainable way to travel and work."

After all, hard work meant survival back when Zhang left his hometown of Qingdao for Melbourne alone at age 15.

Speaking little English, he lived with an Australian host family. Soon after settling in, Zhang discovered his parents were facing financial difficulties back home.

"I [had] two choices: either I just return to China and try to go back to the education system there, or I continue to stay in Australia and figure out how to pay [for my] tuition and living [expenses] on my own," Zhang recalled in an interview with CNBC earlier this year.

He chose to remain in Australia and accepted whatever jobs he could find to support himself while studying computer science at the University of Melbourne.

He took on four blue-collar jobs on top of his coursework, washing dishes at a restaurant during the day, tending bar in the evenings, working overnight at a petrol station and packing lemons at a factory over the summer.

Airwallex cofounder Jack Zhang. Photo from the University of Melbourne's website

Zhang graduated in 2007 and began his career in banking. Outside his day job, however, he poured his energy into entrepreneurship, launching a variety of businesses on the side that included a cafe, a phone case business, an import-export company, a project management firm and a real estate development group.

The businesses generated enough income that financial worries had faded by the time Zhang reached his 20s. But more importantly, they were attempts to find his true passion.

"I spent about five years between [the ages of] 25 and 30 to figure out what was making me happy and that’s why I started so many businesses," Zhang said in a Q&A session at his alma mater. "Every single one was making money but none of them really had a social impact and at some stage I didn’t feel like they were making me happy anymore."

It was while operating one of those businesses, a coffee shop, that Zhang identified the problem that would eventually lead to Airwallex. Cross-border payments at the time relied heavily on banks and cumbersome SWIFT transfers, which often came with expensive fees.

A $15,000 purchase of coffee beans from overseas suppliers carried over $500 in transfer fees while failed payments could take weeks to be discovered.

Determined to make global business-to-business payments faster and more affordable, Zhang cofounded Airwallex in 2015 with Jacob Dai, Lucy Liu and Max Li.

Beyond that, Zhang has said he was also motivated by the desire to build something his children would feel proud of.

Airwallex’s business only started to pick up in 2018, after two earlier products failed and the company shifted focus toward foreign-currency conversions and mass payouts for large enterprises. It started securing major clients, including Singapore-based retailer Shein.

The company was generating roughly $2 million in annualized revenue that same year when payments giant Stripe made a $1.2 billion acquisition offer, a deal that would have made Zhang hundreds of millions of dollars richer.

His cofounders were split on the decision, with Liu and Dai preferring to continue scaling the business while Li viewed the offer as attractive.

Airwallex's cofounders (left to right): Xijing Dai, Jack Zhang, Lucy Liu and Max Li. Photo from Blackbird VC's website

The offer was eventually turned down, with the choice being more about personal lifestyle, according to Zhang. The acquisition would have required him to stay on for another five years, after which he felt he might not have the energy left to start another company.

The decision proved to be the right one. Over the years, Airwallex has evolved beyond payments, expanding into business bank accounts and expense management tools, and is now used by numerous companies ranging from Qantas to JD.com.

It reached $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and $287 billion in annualized transaction volume, according to its website. It has 300,000 customers across 47 countries, including markets such as China, Japan, the U.K., Mexico and the U.S.

While Airwallex’s global footprint has benefited its business, it has also drawn scrutiny. High-profile Silicon Valley investor Keith Rabois, who sits on the board of Airwallex rival Ramp, publicly accused the startup of sending U.S. customer data to China.

Zhang has refuted the claim as "patently false," explaining that U.S. customer data is stored in the U.S. and cannot be accessed by staff based in China and Hong Kong. Other payments industry executives cited by Forbes have also said they do not believe such allegations have merit.

People close to Zhang say it is rare to speak with him without the discussion, at some level, turning to work. Even his partner’s social media posts have joked about how often he is attached to his phone.

"I don’t really separate ‘work’ and ‘life’ in the traditional sense. I think more in terms of training, recovery, and performance, the way a professional athlete would," Zhang told the Australian Financial Review earlier this year.

Outside of business, he says his priority is maintaining mental and physical sharpness and using travel, quiet time and long walks to reset and think clearly.

"I think of myself less as someone ‘with hobbies’ and more as someone in training, every day, for the long game," he said, adding that the "long game" is building Airwallex into a "generational" company he expects to lead for years to come.