It took Jack Zhang 10 startups to figure out what he truly wanted to do. His most recent one, Airwallex, turned him into a billionaire.

Zhang launched the fintech payments company in 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, and found a niche helping global companies pay offshore vendors and employees. He has since led Airwallex to expand well beyond payments, offering global bank accounts, corporate cards, bill payments and bookkeeping. Its 300,000 customers span 47 countries, including China, Japan, the U.K., Mexico and the U.S.

The cofounder and CEO owns 12% of the company, a stake now worth $1.3 billion. That follows a fundraise earlier this month, when Airwallex secured $320 million at an $11 billion valuation. The new investment was led by Lee Fixel’s Addition, with additional backing from Baillie Gifford, QED, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia and Haun Ventures, among others.

Zhang grew up in Shandong, China, and was raised primarily by his grandmother. His parents, both bankers, worked so much that he only saw them on weekends. In 2000 at age 15, he was sent to live in Australia with a host family because his father thought Zhang was too rebellious to stay in China. “I spoke up a lot, and my dad felt I was probably more suitable for Western culture,” says Zhang, now 41.

Just a year later, his father lost his job, forcing Zhang to support himself and later pay his own tuition at the University of Melbourne. He worked as a dishwasher, did overnight shifts as a gas station attendant and became a bartender. During summers, he worked at a lemon factory, carrying boxes of lemons and piling them onto gigantic crates for 12 hours a day.

After graduating from college in 2007 with a degree in computer science, Zhang worked as a software engineer at an insurance company and then as an algorithmic trader at National Australia Bank, where he traded foreign currencies. Yet during his spare time, he also helped launch over a half-dozen small businesses, which ranged from a real estate development company to a burger chain. “I was really just trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” he says.

While running a coffee shop business, he saw how painful global money movement could be. To buy coffee beans, he had to pay Western Union a 4.5%........

© Forbes