Meet Payoneer: Fly exclusive interview with CFO Bea Ordonez

In an exclusive interview with The Fly, Payoneer’s (PAYO) CFO Bea Ordonez talked about the company, its outlook, its relationship with different marketplaces and much more.

HIGH RETENTION RATE: Payoneer is a financial technology company whose goal is to empower the world’s small and medium-sized businesses to transact, do business and grow globally. The company provides online money transfer and digital services. Payoneer has recently held its Investor Day, where the company highlighted its high customer retention rate of around 70 percent.

“We think we have such a sticky product, such a unique opportunity because we provide this unique set of capabilities to a population of entities that are underserved by the traditional sort of financial system. So, as you think of the challenges of being an SMB period, let alone being an SMB in markets that rely on cross-border trade to really generate revenue and growth, it’s incredibly challenging. And what Payoneer does across a really vast geographic footprint is look to solve those frictions and those challenges and really allow those SMBs who, as I say, are underserved by the traditional financial system, whether it’s local banks who just don’t have cross-border capabilities or global banks who just aren’t going to operate in that space or other payment providers who don’t have that kind of scale in terms of sort of reach,” CFO Bea Ordonez explained in an exclusive interview with The Fly.

“Those SMBs are left sort of very challenged just to do kind of the basic things around getting paid, managing their funds across multiple currencies, and paying. And we deliver a solution within a single sort of digital financial stack that solves for many of those challenges.”

UPBEAT OUTLOOK: Payoneer also provided a very upbeat outlook during its Investor Day. “We outlined what we think is a really compelling opportunity, a $6T market opportunity, 80M SMBs. We’ve got a track record of delivering strong growth. As we look forward, and while there’s uncertainty in any market or any opportunity, we see strong e-comm trends more generally, and we see strong secular tailwinds. That really positions us to continue to capture market share and grow. Then we benefit from a unique set of assets: our platform, our local expertise and powerful acquisition engine,” Ordonez says.

MARKET SHARE: Payoneer operates in a very large market, still quite underpenetrated. “We don’t view it as a winner-take-all market. It’s a $6T market just from a payment perspective. If you add up the marketplace segment where we already have very significant share in that marketplace payment facilitation, and then take the direct-to-consumer and the B2B space – and we’ve done $64M, give or take, in market volume or in payment volume over the last 12 months – we see there’s a lot of market there,” the CFO explains.

Payoneer sees “really good” product market fit in specific regions. “We’re looking at focusing our acquisition and our retention and our product development efforts to capture those markets. We’re very focused on what we’ve defined as our ideal customer profile and on the larger cohort of ideal customers within that segment,” the executive added.

RELATIONSHIP WITH MARKETPLACES: Payoneer has recently announced it had expanded its deal with Airbnb (ABNB). Payoneer is a preferred payment provider for Airbnb across multiple countries, enabling Hosts to get paid quickly and locally. “It’s an ecosystem that we continue to invest in. From our founding in 2005, we built an infrastructure that was designed to facilitate marketplace payouts from the likes of Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) and all those kinds of folks into third-party sellers on a global basis. Our relationships with marketplaces vary. We have exclusive relationships with some where we are the exclusive provider of payment services into those. For others, we’re part of their broader ecosystem in terms of providing payment services. But in all cases, we view sort of these marketplaces and platforms as a key strategic advantage for us. They form a powerful ecosystem for us and a powerful acquisition tool in terms of the SMBs that we serve, and they give us real scale sort of in general, which we then leverage within our banking network as well,” Ordonez explained to The Fly.

DIVERSIFIED BUSINESS: Discussing any potential misconceptions regarding the company, Payoneer’s CFO said she believes the “degree to which Payoneer is diversified is not always well understood. We’re a complicated business, I suppose, but we certainly try to simplify the narrative and the positioning to really explain the problem we solve as opposed to how we solve it. But I think what is underappreciated as we talk to investors and talk more broadly, it’s just how diversified our revenues and our business are, both from a sort of geographical perspective and the customers that we serve, as well as the verticals and sectors that we operate in.”

“Meet the Company” is The Fly’s recurring series of exclusive short interviews with Executive Officers to offer a deeper look inside the company. A more detailed version of some of the questions to follow.

For more on the company’s customer retention rate click here.

For more on the company’s outlook click here.

For more on market share click here.

For more on the company’s partnerships click here.

For more on the company’s diversified business click here.