Thomas Jennings Prepared for Matt Patterson & the SME & Growth team

Account Executive · SME & Growth Business, Americas · Remote, US

An SME never buys payments. It buys the removal of what payments is blocking.

Fourteen years selling payments and financial software, eight of them straight into small businesses — merchant acceptance at Elite, the QuickBooks ecosystem at Intuit, high-velocity SaaS at Salesflow. The pipeline was always mine to build.

What follows is how I read the SME cross-border problem, where I already have reps, and where I would be learning on Airwallex's time. All of it is checkable.

The signature view

Where an SME's money actually gets stuck

Airwallex sells one continuous path. SMEs experience it as five separate frustrations, and they only pick up the phone when one of them starts costing something visible. Marked below: where I have direct reps, where I have adjacent reps, and where I would be starting from research.

Accept

Approval rates, local method coverage, and the checkout that quietly loses a percentage of foreign buyers.

Direct reps

Convert

FX spread the founder never priced into margin, plus the accounts they had to open in each market to get paid at all.

Learning curve

Hold & spend

Cash sitting in four places, cards issued outside any system, and a finance lead reconciling spend by hand.

Adjacent reps

Pay out

Supplier and contractor payments that clear on someone else's timetable, with funding and settlement opaque until they don't.

Direct reps

Reconcile

The close. Unapplied cash, posting failures, exception queues — the work that turns a payment into usable data.

Direct reps
Direct reps — sold or discovered it in the field Adjacent — worked the workflow, not the product Learning curve — named, not claimed

The record

Four numbers that predict the next quota

Everything here is from a full-cycle seat: my own pipeline, my own discovery, my own close.

~80/mo

Executive conversations sustained monthly at Salesflow, at a ~25% close rate — roughly 20 closed-won every month, selling into software companies, agencies, and technology-enabled services.

$500K → $1M+

ARR in six months at Employer Benefit Systems, by opening a new compliance-driven vertical and building a one-to-many channel through regional franchise organizations.

0 → 20+

Named banking and treasury opportunities generated from a standing start in 60 days at Bank Up — pure outbound, sourced from operational triggers and contract timing rather than a list.

$4B+

In annual volume on the payment-operations platform I repositioned from lockbox vendor to receivables infrastructure — then field-tested that narrative in live discovery with banks and municipal finance teams.

If I had the territory

Where I would point the first ninety days

Not a plan I would defend in month two — a starting hypothesis I would expect discovery to break.

Vertical bet

Ecommerce brands at their second market

  • The trigger is expansion, not dissatisfaction. Nobody replaces a processor for sport.
  • SaaS and subscription businesses with foreign billing come second — same pain, longer cycle.
  • Professional services with overseas contractors is the payout-side entry point.

Outbound motion

Signals over lists

  • Storefront and checkout signals: new currencies, new local methods, new market pages.
  • Hiring signals for finance and ops roles — the tell that manual reconciliation broke.
  • Partner and app-ecosystem adjacency: who they already run their stack on.

What I would build

Repeatable, then handed over

  • A discovery frame that starts with how money moves, not with the product.
  • Documented objection paths on FX pricing and multi-entity setup, written down for the team.
  • Clean Salesforce hygiene from day one — forecasting only works if the inputs are honest.

The part most one-pagers leave out

Where I would be learning

I have not sold multi-currency FX at Airwallex's scale. My cross-border fluency is real but structural — I understand how funds and data move, where they break, and who owns the break. I have not sat across from a founder and defended a spread, or walked a finance lead through opening entities in three markets.

What I would bring instead: eight years of selling to small businesses who do not have a procurement process, a payments background that starts at interchange and ends at reconciliation, and a demonstrated habit of learning a category by mapping it and then testing it on live calls — which is exactly what I did at Bank Up, from a standing start, in a market I did not know.

If that trade is worth a conversation, I would rather have it early than perform certainty I have not earned.