The fact that Chinese people became the richest woman in New Zealand suddenly pushed a name into the spotlight-Liu Yueting.
An ordinary girl who immigrated from China became a financial technology entrepreneur with billions of assets twenty years later.
The story sounds like a legend, but every step she takes is actually quite simple.
In 2003, she was twelve years old and came to New Zealand with her parents from China.
Just landed in Auckland, language, culture, and society all changed the world.
At the time, her English was also accented, and often did not understand the content of the class, and could only rely on words and information over and over again.
Before long, she was admitted to a famous local girls' middle school.
That school had high requirements and fast pace. She learned to be independent there and slowly built a sense of competition.
Most children from immigrant families understand things early.
There is nothing to rely on but a little effort to catch up with others.
When she graduated from high school, she applied for finance at the University of Melbourne in Australia with excellent results. It was the first time she really felt the trajectory in which “effort” could really change her life.
College days are not bad.
Financial lessons are intense and abstract, data analysis, economic models, risk control, all have to be chewed from scratch.
She practically used the library as a dormitory, buried in reports and cases in addition to classes.
Gradually, she learned to read the logic behind the data and understood the threshold of finance: you have to understand the rules to be eligible to participate.
After graduating in 2012, she decided to return home to work as a financial analyst at ZK.
In those years, she worked daily with reports, analytical reports, market data, learned how to judge the value of enterprises, and also experienced the high-pressure rhythm of the financial world for the first time.
Later, she went to Hong Kong and joined an investment institution.
There’s a faster pace, meetings, projects, customers, one by one.
Every morning before opening, watch back and change the program at night, and often do not rest on weekends.
In those years, she sharpened her execution, judgment and ability to withstand pressure to the extreme.
In 2015, she and several friends founded Airwallex, a financial technology company that does cross-border payments in Melbourne.
At that time, cross-border settlements were slow and expensive.
Traditional banking fees are high and slow, and small and medium-sized enterprises are trapped outside the system.
Seeing the pain point, she decided to do something “which doesn’t look so bright but is useful.”
When Airwallex first started, no one was optimistic.
Investors feel that cross-border payments are too money-burning, too complex, and impossible to do.
She is responsible for the hardest part – license applications and international compliance.
It was a long-distance race to deal with the supervision of various countries. Every time you win a financial service license, it means running countless documents, talking about law firms, and changing policy documents.
In those years, she was on a plane almost every year, traveling through three time zones a week.
After 2018, the company entered an expansion period.
She led her team to enter the European and American markets.
The regulations, exchange rates, and anti-money laundering systems in different countries are different, and every step is like stepping on a steel thread.
She has made the company's compliance system extremely solid and used stupid methods to do difficult things. It is these unpretentious "slow motion" that has given the company a firm foothold in the field of financial technology.
The 2020 epidemic is coming, the global economy is shaking, but cross-border e-commerce has come to an outbreak.
A large number of companies need efficient and low-cost settlement methods, and Airwallex has ushered in a growth peak.
Trading volume doubled, and large companies from various industries appeared on the customer list.
She didn’t take the time to refine the concept, but focused only on stabilizing the system and improving its efficiency.
The technical team improved the algorithm to minimize exchange rate losses and increase the arrival speed to the same day.
She led the launch of AI approval tools, halved the error rate of opening accounts, and improved the efficiency of processes significantly.
In 2024, the company's valuation will exceed $6 billion.
Her personal shareholding is not high, but her wealth has already exceeded 3 billion yuan.
More importantly, she became the first Chinese woman in New Zealand's history to rank first in the wealth list.
This incident is not only a symbol of wealth, but also a symbol of status-an immigrant girl has made a place in the global financial system.
There is a lot of talk from the outside world.
Some people marvel at her "legend", some analyze the team, capital, and strategy behind her, and others question the bubble of financial technology.
But she rarely responds.In an interview, she said only one thing: “Technology is about to save business, and financial services is about to get small and medium-sized customers further.”
This sentence may seem ordinary, but it accurately points out her logic-- Don't chase concepts, don't pretend to be a wind, do things solidly, and someone will naturally see them.
As a female entrepreneur, she faces far more challenges than anyone else.
Multinational teams, project negotiations, and policy coordination, what the outside world sees is a halo of success, behind which are countless flights and meetings that have stayed up all night.
She often says that her greatest luck is that her team trusts her and her family understands her.
This is plain, but for a woman who is struggling in the global financial industry, it is probably true.
The success of Airwallex was not based on astonishing creativity, but a little bit of grinding.
Liu Xiaobo took ten years to prove that a girl of ordinary origin can also stand in the coldest industry.
Her story is not so dramatic, and there are no inspirational slogans, but a clear path: Understand the rules, dare to implement, be able to persevere.
The wealth list was just the result, and what she really changed was the other person’s imagination of “Chinese women.”
“You don’t win by being born, but by being seen by what you can do.”