Hi Fintech Architects,
In this episode, Lex speaks with John Caplan — CEO of Payoneer, a public fintech company driving over $85 billion in annual cross-border payment volume. With roots as a prepaid card provider, Payoneer has evolved into a global financial operating platform serving 2 million entrepreneurs across 190 countries.
Caplan shares insights from his entrepreneurial journey—from building OpenSky and scaling it to $50 million in revenue before its acquisition by Alibaba, to now leading Payoneer’s transformation into a full-service banking alternative for global SMBs.
We explore how Payoneer is addressing the complex financial needs of international businesses, competing in a dynamic payments landscape, and preparing for a future that includes stablecoins, workforce management, and potentially $1 trillion in annual volume.
Thanks for your time and attention,
Matt Low 🙌
Key discussion points:
Payoneer’s Strategic Evolution from Payout Processor to Global SMB Bank Alternative
Under John Caplan’s leadership, Payoneer expanded beyond marketplace payouts to become a comprehensive cross-border financial platform, offering AR/AP, intra-network transfers, cards, and global workforce management. This shift has significantly increased customer retention, take rate, and profitability—highlighting how product expansion and upmarket focus can unlock durable growth in fintech.Execution Over Hype in Global Fintech Infrastructure
Payoneer operates in 190 countries with 100+ banking partners and 7,000 payment routes—demonstrating the importance of deep regulatory compliance, local licensing, and multi-entity support in building resilient cross-border infrastructure. Unlike crypto-native entrants, Payoneer emphasizes last-mile utility and customer trust as core differentiators for scaling in complex markets.Profitable Scale and Global Demand for SMB Financial Services
With $1B+ revenue, $200M+ EBITDA, and $7.5B in customer funds held, Payoneer is proving that serving cross-border SMBs is not just a mission, but a highly profitable business. Their customer base spans from Bangladeshi freelancers to European firms doing $1M+ in volume, signaling massive, underserved global demand for modern financial tools outside the traditional banking system.
Background
Before joining Payoneer, John Caplan built a career at the intersection of entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and global trade. He founded OpenSky, a platform that empowered small businesses to source and sell products online, scaling it to $50 million in revenue before it was acquired by Alibaba Group. At Alibaba, he served as President of North America and Europe, helping Western SMEs connect with global suppliers and driving the company’s international expansion.
Earlier in his career, Caplan held leadership roles at About.com, Arizona Iced Tea, and Starbucks, gaining deep experience in brand building and customer engagement. His track record of scaling platforms and supporting entrepreneurs globally laid the foundation for his leadership at Payoneer.
👑Related coverage👑
Topics:
Payoneer, Alibaba, OpenSky, Stripe, Wise, Airwallex, Mercury, NuBank, digital banking, embedded finance, stablecoins, blockchain, regtech, B2B payments, SPAC, supple chain, ecommerce
Timestamps
1’06: John’s Career Journey: From OpenSky to Alibaba to Payoneer
6’18: Inside OpenSky: Serving Global Sellers and Financing the Supply Chain
9’54: Finding Traction: Failure, Product Market Fit, and China’s E‑Commerce Leap
13’42: Global Distribution: Universal Ambitions, Local Execution
15’52: Behavior Change Beats Legacy: Why Users Digitize When It Matters
17’21: Payoneer at $85B Volume and $1B Revenue: A Platform for Global SMBs
20’49: From Prepaid Cards to Core Operating Account: Evolving Payoneer’s DNA
25’32: Inside Payoneer’s Architecture: Global Bank Network and Internal Ledger
28’26: Global Growth Corridors: LatAm, APAC, and Take Rate Expansion
31’13: Staying the Course: Payoneer’s Post-SPAC Journey Through Volatile Markets
34’03: Misunderstood Value: Stablecoins, Interest Revenue, and Payoneer’s Real Strengths
38’44: Where Global Commerce Bends: Regulation, Platforms, and Resilience
40’58: Path to $1 Trillion: Payoneer’s Strategy for Organic and Inorganic Growth
43’22: The channels used to connect with John & learn more about Payoneer
Illustrated Transcript
Lex Sokolin:
Hi everybody, and welcome to today’s conversation. We are absolutely fortunate to have with us today, John Caplan, who is the CEO of Payoneer. Payoneer is a public company and is one of the original innovators in cross-border payments. And I think a fantastic example to a lot of companies that are being built today. So, I’m really interested to learn more about Payoneer and to learn from John’s career trajectory. Welcome to the conversation.
John Caplan:
Thank you for having me.
Lex Sokolin:
So, I’m going to geek out up front. My very first touchpoint with Payoneer was, I think in 2012, I was at Columbia doing too many graduate degrees, and I was interning for Matt Harris at Bain Capital at the time.
And he was looking at venture investment in Payoneer as like the example of cross-border fintech innovation. And so, for me, it’s kind of a real treat to understand how the company has been built. John, maybe we can start with your career and how you got your entry point into technology and into fintech.
John Caplan:
I am an insatiable entrepreneur, and I had the good fortune to meet Scott Gallet, who was the former CEO at Payoneer while I was running Alibaba.com’s cross-border business, and Scott and I got to know each other, became friends. And when he was thinking about succession planning, he invited me into the company. And it has been three and a half years of intense entrepreneurship, growth, creativity in a dynamic environment. We’re proud of the results and excited about the future. Looking back on my career, I’ve worked from beverage companies like Arizona Iced Tea, Starbucks retail firms, About.com, I founded a business called OpenSky, which we sold to Alibaba Group. My curiosity is what’s driven my professional development and sort of this insatiable desire to learn more and then make a positive impact on people’s lives in the process of building platforms, technology driven platforms.
Lex Sokolin:
Can we go to Alibaba and that experience, because you were there before the acquisition and after, kind of at a time that was pretty incredible for the company, for the story of Chinese technology. What was OpenSky and why did Alibaba engage with you?
John Caplan:
Yeah, we built OpenSky to support small business entrepreneurs who are selling on global marketplaces, who needed help with sales, marketing and distribution. And we scaled the business really successfully, got to $50 million of revenue. And I think the Alibaba team at year 12, 14, 15 of Alibaba Group’s development were looking to bring into the firm sleeves rolled up on global entrepreneurs, as Alibaba Group ambition was to be a more global technology firm to really compete with the Amazon and Googles of the world, they acquired OpenSky. They invested in OpenSky and then acquired OpenSky. And Daniel Zhang, who was CEO at the time, said to me when he bought OpenSky, you’re the kind of entrepreneur we had at Alibaba when we started, and we want you to come in and, you know, shake the tree.
Little did he know that joining Alibaba Group for me was an extraordinary education in resilience commitment, customer centricity, you know, learning about how that organization was creating value for small business owners around the world really taught me a great deal about listening to the needs of customers, understanding how global entrepreneurship is. Having grown up in New York City and from a family of entrepreneurs, it was an extraordinary journey. You know, in a country of one point plus billion people, the 250,000 folks who worked at Alibaba Group were the smartest, best of the best. And to learn and participate with them was extraordinary. From a financial technology perspective, you know, I was had some good exposure to Ant Financial and Alipay and the innovation there and learned about the notion of a super app, what the value props could be, and always wondered why that wasn’t being deployed globally. And obviously there’s geopolitical reasons, regulatory reasons. So, when Scott invited me to join Payoneer, I saw the potential for a global, regulated, trusted solution for the world’s cross-border SMEs that out of the Payoneer assets, we could build. And, you know, in the three and a half years I’ve been here, we have made a real progress towards being a financial operating partner to the most dynamic entrepreneurs on the planet.
Lex Sokolin:
Let’s unpack this a bit, because of course, there’s so much there. Going back to OpenSky, you mentioned the small business and the global nature of small business, and certainly how Alibaba was the engine of Alibaba was sort of this entrepreneurial spirit and transformation that China was going through. And there’s also obviously like a transition between commerce payments, financing. Right. And all of these companies are playing in that space. Can we start at the micro level of, you know, for open sky? What kind of business or persona were you building? What were they trading and what is it that they needed?
John Caplan:
What I found really interesting was the Western entrepreneurs who were sourcing products from around the world and selling them on marketplaces had two challenges. One was identifying high quality goods that they could brand and manufacture, which were largely being produced in China, and then getting distribution on eBay or Amazon or Walmart or Etsy or any of you know, LivingSocial, Groupon, name the platform and how important it was that they match price, their promotion, their advertising, their return on ad spend, their supply chain delivery to create scale.
And so I thought we could do is aggregate brands, provide them a solution that would improve their yield on their online marketing while improving the margins on how they sourced their products. And by doing both, the traders would have more margin to reinvest in their growth. And that worked pretty well and got us some nice scale. That was essentially what OpenSky was all about. I think what Alibaba saw on the team and our approach was, I think, similar to what the trading partners do for us, brands or Western brands that sell on Tmall or Taobao. There’s a whole economy of companies inside of China that helps global brands sell on the on the Chinese marketplaces. And in many ways, we had built a mirror image of that in the West for US brands. And I think that sort of pattern recognition was appealing to the Alibaba Group team.
Lex Sokolin:
What did the supply chain look like, and what were the financial products across that supply chain that, you know, either you were facilitating or saw developing?
John Caplan:
Yeah. I think the most important was this notion of helping people with working capital. Right. And the Western buyer sourcing products and their inconsistent cash flow and the needs for placing orders, sourcing high quality goods, paying for them 30% down when you pay 70% when it gets on the boat. Well before you ever monetize the merchandise. And on the other side, in Asia, the manufacturers had similar challenges sourcing raw materials, getting the quality, managing for returns. And so the if you think about the three global supply chains, they are they are data, money and physical goods and the supply chain of money connected to the supply chain of goods for small businesses is is remarkably complex, and I think I was bitten by the fintech bug in my OpenSky tenure, then at Alibaba and Alibaba.com I saw just how powerful providing capital solutions were for SMEs. And now at Payoneer, working capital is not a large part of our business at all today, but perfecting a solution for multi entity global businesses that are where the majority of their revenue comes outside of their home country, is really animating me and my team and what we’re building here for those entrepreneurs.
Lex Sokolin:
So, at OpenSky, how quickly did you get a feeling of traction? Context for the question is, you know, a lot of fintechs spend years in PowerPoint and raising venture capital and talking about the future. Whereas, you know, I would expect working with real businesses who need financing yesterday for customers that they have is sort of a bit more immediate.
John Caplan:
OpenSky wasn’t a fintech, right? OpenSky was a marketing and distribution solution and technology platform. The you know, we failed twice and succeeded once over seven years. And so the like all entrepreneurs, the building of the business required both luck product market fit and a really great team of people. When we got to our third incarnation, which was our most successful. What was clear is that if you match the needs of global SMEs who were sourcing from China with the needs of the manufacturers and actually aligned goals, you could you could find both margin and value across the supply chain that led to growth for us ultimately. And that led to the sale to Alibaba Group.
Lex Sokolin:
When you were in the Alibaba seat. I guess the question that comes to mind for me is just thinking about the e-commerce industry. I think around that time there was a conversation about how in the US, e-commerce is something like while Amazon of course, was enormous and is enormous, something like 10% of all retail, where in China it was 60% of all retail. Did you see that fault line? Sort of. What were your observations? Did you have any surprise?
John Caplan:
You know, if you think about the power of the US retail ecosystem, it’s really built based on, you know, the cities where people live, the distribution systems, the retail experience and big box stores, malls, you know, branded retailers in China that the infrastructure didn’t exist the same way. So, the e-com distribution and mobile meant that everyone you know, in the tier one or 2 or 3 cities would be able to have access to the Nike sneakers that they wanted without Nike ever having to either physically distribute them to retail stores or open their own.
And so it felt like the pace of digital distribution was so extraordinarily fast that the and the rising middle class in China was excited about getting access to the world’s brands, that there was the best of both worlds for the innovation of retail. Now it was what built, you know, Tmall, Taobao, you know, all the best Chinese e-commerce companies, you know. So, I think that I think that really was what the power was there. I think in the US today, you can see how E-com continues to be really dynamic and powerful. But retailers, physical retailers are continuing to try to create experiences that make shopping in a physical store fun, dynamic, interesting. I think it’ll be instructive to see for Q4 2025, a couple of years out from the pandemic, just the continued solid, you know, high single digit growth of E-com as it eats into the physical retail experience here in the US.
Lex Sokolin:
I’d love to go one level deeper on this because, you know, I think at like the system architecture level, there’s sort of a there’s a very intuitive story about well, here in the US, you had the incumbents and you have consumers that have a certain behavioral set of preferences.
And in China that wasn’t there. And so, sort of like a blue ocean. But when you go down to the micro level of, you know, how does somebody even design a distribution network at the scale that Alibaba did, right? Like, how do you warehouse, how do you create the network of companies that deliver the goods, you know, locally to the long tail of where people live? Do you have any examples that could bring that tension to life?
John Caplan:
I don’t think that’s going to happen here in the US, the way it happened in across Asia. Right. Because I think both the regulatory environment in the US, across the supply chain, the city, state federal rules, I think make difficult. I was reading something just this morning that there’s an effort in New York City to ban Amazon trucks from delivering, and they want Amazon goods in New York City to be delivered on bicycle. I think that’d be wonderful for the environment and probably fantastic for traffic, but likely not great for the mass distribution of products to everybody’s apartment buildings around New York.
Lex Sokolin:
Yeah, you just have to put robots on a bike and then it’s fine.
John Caplan:
Yeah, exactly. So, what I actually think about supply chains is they are the ambitions are universal, but the executions local. And what worked in Shanghai is going to be totally different than what’s going to work in Mexico City. And it’s going to be completely different than it’ll work in Chicago. And part of that, I think, is the lesson of globalizing big companies is you have to have a universal value prop that you can localize effectively. And certainly, a Payoneer. We see that in our products, right? We have 2 million active customers. Some of them are small freelancers in Bangladesh and others are billion-dollar firms in Europe. They use different products of ours, but all of it’s on a common sort of central infrastructure platform that we’ve built and designed. And I think much is the same in the distribution of physical goods. It’s certainly true in the distribution of financial services.
Lex Sokolin:
How much does it hurt to have legacy infrastructure and incumbents and these embedded prior behaviors in place? You know, because this often comes up in stories about like M-Pesa in Africa or in the, you know, the manufacturing build out in Asia or the e-commerce story that you just touched on. Is it really that big of a deal, or do you find that people can adopt new behavior is if it’s worth it to them. Like, how do you get people to digitize?
John Caplan:
Yeah. So, I think that I think that’s the essence of certainly the last couple of decades of the entrepreneurial economy is if you actually make someone’s life better, they’ll change their behavior. Right. And we’ve seen that with what the big e-commerce players have done in the US. We’ve seen that with what the peer-to-peer remittance companies have done. If you compare what firms like Remitly has done compared to what Moneygram has done, and you certainly see it in what we’re doing at Payoneer with our solutions for the multi entity global entrepreneurs, they view us as a better alternative than what local banks or analogue banks or traditional banks can offer. That’s cheaper and faster and more trusted. And so, they choose us over the alternative. I think it’s, I think remarkably simple. You got to create more value than you take.
And when you do that, people will adopt the solutions that you offer. That would be my view. You know, it’s a little bit like the Netflix guys talking about buying Warner Discovery these days and saying, you know what? I think people maybe like watching movies on their couch more than they like watching them in a movie theater. And therefore, the distribution model has changed. And, you know, that’s certainly true in my family.
Lex Sokolin:
That’s a great transition to Payoneer. Could you give us a sense of the company’s scale today in terms of volumes and revenues, and then maybe how long the company has been in business as well?
John Caplan:
We just celebrated our 20-year Anniversary, and I’m the third CEO the firm has had. And we are over $1 billion in revenue. Well, north of $200 million of adjusted EBITDA, $85 billion of volumes. We are 2 million active customers. We’ve had 16.5% compound annual growth for the 11 quarters I’ve been. CEO of the firm. And we’ve taken our business that the core business, which had been unprofitable when I arrived.
And we will deliver north of $30 million of core EBITDA this year. We hold about $7.5 billion of customer funds in balances. That’s up 17% year over year. Our largest customers are, you know, the customers that do over $1 million in annual volume are delivering the vast majority of our B2B growth as we’ve evolved the firm from being a marketplace payouts company to being a foreign bank alternative for cross-border businesses. So, you know, our business is healthy, growing, profitable, nearly $200 million of free cash flow. This is a strong, solid, growing, exciting company these days.
Lex Sokolin:
The company went public through a SPAC merger in ‘21 at the boom of SPAC transactions, and also sort of the boom of post-Covid traction inflation across the industry. But what you described $85 billion in volume. I mean, that’s a very significant company. And I mean, it looks like you’ve more than doubled revenues or effectively. So since going public.
John Caplan:
You know, one of the things I think that’s really important, and I think overlooked is the Payoneer solution really solves the most challenging part of global entrepreneurship, which is not on the financial services side, the CEO or CFO or entrepreneur who’s building a business process Outsourcer or marketing services firm, a grain distribution company from Ukraine.
Those entrepreneurs really power the global economy. They are, you know, in countries where the GDP is driven over 50% of the GDP is driven by SMB exports. Our business is exceptionally strong and getting stronger, and I think the next decade of entrepreneurship, not just AI and not just stablecoin, but it’s actually globalization. It’s this notion that innovation can happen anywhere. It’s not just Silicon Valley, it’s not just London, it’s not just stablecoins or as traded assets. It’s actually a time where the world’s entrepreneurs can sleep anywhere and serve everyone. And Payoneer is designed to be the business partner to those firms.
Lex Sokolin:
I definitely want to unpack both the product and sort of the comparison to other cross-border businesses and kind of talk about the future of money movement. But before going there, can you give us a flavor of what Payoneer looked like before you arrived and like during its founding? Like, what was the original customer segment that it was going after. What was its DNA and how did the firm. Think about that opportunity in the early days.
John Caplan:
Yeah. So Payoneer started as a prepaid card solution for people who were traveling the firm. As marketplace distribution evolved, Payoneer solved a very specific problem, which was the world’s Western marketplaces wanted access to global supply, but the financial system wasn’t designed to make it easy for those entrepreneurs to get local bank accounts in the West. And so Payoneer solved the would do the KYC and money movement solution for global entrepreneurs who were selling on Western marketplaces. So, the source of funds was well known. If you do effective KYC and build a global network of licenses and banks, the firm very effectively aggregated billions and tens of billions of dollars of volume with the world’s most meaningful Marketplaces. When I arrived, observing the sort of assembled assets, what was clear talking to our customers was that not only did they sell on marketplaces, they sold, they sold wholesale, or they sold direct to consumer for the goods firms and meeting with services firms around the world. They also had complex financial services needs that their local bank in Pakistan or in Vietnam or in Colombia or Bolivia, Peru were unable to solve, but they had as dynamic as businesses, as in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.
And we moved the firm very aggressively from an AR first company to being an AR and AP company. Our cards business is now 12% of our total usage is spent on paying your cards distributed around the world. We developed intra network payments, so two Payoneer customers around the globe could move money to one another instantly. We extended our pay with Payoneer solutions so that our customers could source raw materials or. Packing boxes or pay vendors directly out of their Payoneer account. And as we expanded the set of solutions we were offering to entrepreneurs, we saw a really interesting dynamic. They would bring more of their AR volume into their Payoneer account. It wasn’t a pass-through account. You know, Lex, I used to think of it as sort of a tollbooth on the money highway. If we moved the business into being the primary operating account for the international activities of the entrepreneurs who use AR capabilities. In doing so, we moved the firm up market. When I arrived, 20% of our customers were what I would think of as small SMB.
Now it’s a third of our customers are our largest cohort of customers, our largest customers. The logo, volume and net revenue retention is some of the best I’ve seen at any company I’ve worked at. We are very focused on moving Payoneer up market because there’s a there’s a gap in the solutions. The multinational banks don’t have the service or technology or tools. The small local banks have none of the technology or capability. But the entrepreneurs who we work with are they do business in dozens of countries, and they used to have to have dozens of banking relationships, and they’re turning to Payoneer as their primary international account and using their local domestic account for all the domestic needs they have. And that’s what’s, I think, unlocked this second curve of growth that the firm has experienced over the last couple of years, and one that we are just hellbent on continuing to deliver for our global customers.
Lex Sokolin:
That’s fantastic to see. I want to ask what’s probably an irritating competitive question, but also as a way to understand a little bit better how the product works.
You know, I think a lot of people who’ve seen cross-border payments companies, there’s always a diagram of, you know, Swift and the inefficiencies of kind of going through multiple hops between different geographies. And then there’s like, you know, a network map that clears the payments through a single entity. And, you know, whether that’s TransferWise in the middle for retail users. And I think these days Airwallex is trying to tell that story as well. You know, Mercury is telling that story to some extent. Payoneer was there, I think, earlier than a lot of these other companies. Can you talk about the architecture of the product itself? You know, how you accomplish this global cross-border payment stuff and then how you think about differentiation against these other names?
John Caplan:
Actually, Lex, this may be surprising to you. I celebrate the success of all the actors in the industry because I actually think the buffet is big enough that everyone can eat here, and the innovation actually makes all the firms better. So how do we work? You know, we have about 7000 routes served, 100 local bank and PSP relationships, a very smart routing system optimized for speed and price and volume, a onboarding, very compliant onboarding process for everyone from freelancers and micro businesses and SMEs, including those multi entity SMEs that I described in 190 countries and territories.
We may be the only or one of the only scale global fintechs that are doing what I just described in terms of how our financial stack works. You know, we give customers the basic ability to pay, get paid and hold balances and those multiple currencies. And I imagine you and I’ll talk about the additional new rails of stablecoins, adding sort of the promise of stablecoins is what the multi-currency promise that Payoneer has pioneered over the last 21 years, and what we’re really doing is helping customers be local to their end customers wherever they do business, and that whether they’re invoicing a customer or integrating into their billing or leveraging all the multiple payment methods, getting paid and paying someone is the central nervous system of how modern business works, and we’re enabling that to happen. We’re on the ground in 30 countries, which I think is substantial. You know, today a third of our revenue is B2B, and it grew 27% in Q3. And, you know, we are taking share from the local banks and we are delivering lots of value.
So, whether it’s you’re thinking of Revolut or new bank or Airwallex or any of the fine firms that are providing lots of value to individuals or trying to provide some value to micro businesses, I think. Our focus on the multi entity, larger SMB is unique in this landscape. And we have, I think, a lot of runway in front of us.
Lex Sokolin:
So, from a naive perspective, the product architecture is lots of local bank accounts across the world. And then an internal ledger that you’re maintaining to kind of net the FX across all the different locations.
John Caplan:
That is a much more simple way of answering your own questions. So, well done. Just checking. Thank you for helping.
Lex Sokolin:
Okay. And then when you look at global corridors for where the economic activity and then your payments, tooling and card product and so on have the most traction, what are the corridors that you’re seeing growth in?
John Caplan:
We as a public firm we share. We share our results quarterly. And you can see, you know, the success we’ve had in Latin America, the success we’ve had across APAC the strength of our business in Greater China.
You know, the momentum we’re seeing in the Middle East. You know, just pulling up. If you look at our revenue growth in Q3 year over year, China was up 12%. APAC was 25%. Latam was 21%. And what’s really exciting about our business is we’ve seen take rate expansion. And I think it’s rarely discussed, but many of the financial technology firms have seen take rate compression or they’re buying volumes. We’ve actually seen take rate expansion and profitability margin expansion in our business. So, we are seeing a healthier, stronger portfolio of customers and a significantly healthier and stronger personnel.
Lex Sokolin:
What’s driving that is it increased economic growth in those geographies. And you know, you were there early. And so, you’re winning more share or better products. Is it some sort of globalization?
John Caplan:
Yeah, I’d say yes. Yes, and yes. I mean, in Latin America and APAC take rates are greater. Our brand is powerful, our executions exceptional, and our product suite meets the needs of our of our customers.
We just we acquired a year ago a little over a year ago workforce management business. So now our customers are not only using Payoneer to pay and get paid with their customers, with their supply chains or paying contractors, they’re turning to Payoneer to handle their global employer of record needs. So, if you’re hiring people in 30 countries with a click of a button, you can do it in a compliant way with a Payoneer solution. And that business is growing exceptionally well. Small but growing exceptionally well. I think the success is focus. You know, you delivering certainty inside the organization and clarity has helped us deliver value to our customers because everyone at Payoneer is intensely focused on this segment of customers that were super serving and were not distracted by the noise that other folks are making about their success. We’re just delivering ours.
Lex Sokolin:
When you look at being a public company, I’d love to talk to you about that experience, about the kind of the SPAC transaction and then being in the markets since the SPAC transaction, you have pretty impressive fundamental growth in almost, you know, a steady line over the last four years. And yet there’s been kind of all this public market volatility.
John Caplan:
I really enjoy actually running the business as a public company, I think for a few reasons. One, the transparency is, I think, a strength. Our customers are proud to know that they can understand our financials. They like that we’re listed on Nasdaq. Our global customers recognize that that’s an achievement of our organization. I like that our investments we’ve made in compliance technology have paid off. And so, our trust among regulators around the world and our bank partners around the world is very high. But I think it’s important to be straight, right? 2025 was an intense year in a tough environment. You know, markets and the macro have been exceptionally volatile and the payment sentiment has been weak. And the noise around the macro and payments has been everywhere. But despite all of that noise, our business has gotten substantially stronger and healthier. So, you know, we are managing the business for decades, not quarters. And I think that’s just the way we view it.
And I don’t know, I got to check up the other day and he said, you have the blood pressure of a 15-year-old. You can handle the stress. And that’s just the truth. Like it’s, you know, like our business is our business is really solid and our team is kick ass, and we’re hell bent and focused. And when you are those things, over time, you create a lot of shareholder value. But I want to acknowledge, right. For investors, you know, that it is not lost on me that our good work and our hard work and our exceptional results have yet to be reflected in our stock price. And that is important that we deliver for our shareholders. And I’m, you know, we are very committed to doing so.
Lex Sokolin:
I found that after the SPAC boom, a lot of fintech assets became misunderstood by the markets, and people couldn’t tell high quality companies from things that were taken to market opportunistically. You know, another example, very different example, would be something like the neo–Bank Dave.
I talked to them in the middle of, I think, 2023 when posts back they had got down 95%. But if you looked at their economics, it was just a straight line up and they’ve had a tremendous recovery from 24. Pretty much not all the way, but pretty much to their SPAC valuation. Do you feel like the public markets still kind of misunderstand what Payoneer does? And are there ways to tap into some of the payments stories and narratives that are out in the market now? You know, so previously you had mentioned stablecoins. I mean, circle, if you look at their profitability roughly in your neighborhood, but it feels like these stories have so much power.
John Caplan:
Let’s actually talk about that. You know, if we think about the things that are let’s talk about stablecoin first for the multi-currency wallet that Payoneer is built, we will in the first half of next year at stablecoin to our wallet. And today you can’t buy a hammer in Vietnam with USDC. You actually need to convert it into the local currency, just like you couldn’t buy a hammer in Vietnam with the Argentinian peso.
So, the last mile, that which where we are exceptionally strong, is how the promise of B2B stablecoin payments becomes a thing. Absent. That is just rhetoric. And so, it is true. We hold $7.5 billion of customer funds and $85 billion moving west to east or north to south, primarily in the paying our platform. And so, when we look at our opportunity as it relates to stablecoin, I think the key is that we deliver substance and not hype. And that’s what our organization is doing. And I think the race is long and we feel confident about where we will sit. Another area likes that people have been, I think maybe naive when they’ve thought about Payoneer is that they viewed our interest revenue as they’ve misunderstood our interest revenue, holding $7.5 billion of funds and earning a couple hundred million dollars of interest revenue on that is a strength, not a weakness, because our customers hold our funds with us, because they trust us, we earn yield on that, and then we monetize when our customers use those funds and those and our balances are up 17% year over year, and hundreds of millions of dollars of money is moving out of local bank accounts into Payoneer accounts such that our customers can use our AP products.
So, I think considering Payoneer as interest exposes naive to both the customer value proposition as well as the hedges we’ve put in place to deal with interest rate fluctuations. And then I’d say finally, you know, a criticism of Payoneer has been, hey, you’re 20% of your revenue is China to the US. And I think it is certainly true. 25 and the tariffs has been a, earthquake through the cross-border distribution of physical goods. But when you when you sort of scratch in and understand what’s happening to the global economy. Chinese exports are essential for global retailers. And I think failing to see the role that China and frankly, Payoneer plays in the cross-border economy is missing the mark. You know, there is certainly tariff policy, but 90 plus percent of the toys and baby strollers and hangers or whatever, you know, the things that people buy that are sold on Amazon and Walmart and eBay and Etsy are not going to be on short or near short any time. You know, over 50% of Amazon products are, I believe, are manufactured in China.
So on the three areas that are, I think, sort of casual criticisms of Payoneer, I believe people have not seen it clearly enough. And so, while the broader sentiment in the payment sector may have been negative and some of that is outside of our control, what is in our control is how we execute and deliver. And that’s why the board approved the $300 million buyback. We’ve been ramping that up, as we’ve talked about publicly. You know, we see real value in the business we’re building and we believe others will as well.
Lex Sokolin:
When you think back to the conversation, we had about global supply chains and consumer behavior, I’m trying to think of how to contrast that with, you know, the tariff shock. And we can put interest rates to the side. Right. Because that affects pretty much all financials equally. Right. So, if you’re holding deposits or if you’re doing payments that’s going to impact everybody. You’re talking about the sort of arbitrage or delta that comes from a change in the political environment. What is more malleable? What is more or less fragile, sort of the value chains that you’re talking about, where people have built these over years and years and you’ve got these consumer behaviors, you know, and then on the other side, the new economics of what could be global commerce. Where do you see that change and bend based on the last 15 years of what you’ve been doing? You know, where should we expect to see the give?
John Caplan:
Yeah. It’s a it’s a super interesting question. You know, I’ll have to think about how I would answer that, you know, truly. And which is awkward on a podcast. I imagine like what I, what I see is, you know, there is certainly room for financial technology firms like ours to bundle a broad set of products to customers and to see actually continued take rate expansion in doing that, because the value you’re creating for customers continues to expand. I think of, you know, Amazon and what they’ve done with Prime is a really good example of that. I do think some of the give will be the more commodity platforms and companies will get squeezed by the firms that have a broad set of solutions for their customers. And then in this environment where trust with regulators is extraordinarily important, a network of licenses and bank relationships and interoperability between those becomes really important.
I don’t think the geopolitical environment makes global regulation less important. I actually think the trust economy becomes more valuable. And that’s why we’ve, you know, built a very exceptional global licensing office and have continued to build trusted relationships with the folks that govern our ability to provide value to our customers.
Lex Sokolin:
I think we’ve covered some of the future trends, but I’m curious, in terms of the company itself, how do you think about the different paths to growth if you’re looking at these new technologies and whether they’re stablecoins or long tail on and off ramps and things like that. Blockchains for ledgers. Are there things that you’re looking to grow internally or. We know that Stripe, you know, spent a billion and change on Bridge. And then I think Bank was in the news for being acquired to be like a stablecoin engine as well. Are you thinking about inorganic paths to growth in terms of incorporating things into your footprint? And then similarly, are you thinking about kind of larger plays as well to expand the company?
John Caplan:
Yeah. So, I think this is really important. We’ve done three acquisitions during my tenure; all sub $100 million. We have about $500 million on our balance sheet. And as I said at the top, generating $200 million of free cash flow, there is, I think, some rational thinking starting to happen in the private markets as it relates to some of the fintech firms that have had single digit millions of dollars of revenue, but have a 500-x multiple. That seems irrational to me. So, we are considering a set of acquisitions that I think can continue to expand the products and services we offer our current customers, as well as open us up into new geographies and additional verticals. But the first and most important thing we can do to drive both our growth and profitability is focus internally and execute effectively, and that’s the priority of the firm. I do think, cross-border payments, of which were one of the top five firms for sure to. But to be a top ten global fintech, not just in cross-border, you need to get to $1 trillion in volume.
And so, over the next decade, from my chair here at $85 billion and I’ll round up to $100 billion, we’re focused on a march and a climb to aggregate more volume in the niches that we currently serve primarily in the SMB, SME segment for cross-border businesses. But as you know, we serve freelancers, micro businesses. There’s a we have visibility, we serve enterprises, we have visibility into all of these different segments as well as the corridors and geographies. So, what’s been exciting to think about as we as we drive our growth and profitability agenda, is looking at our own data, seeing the trends and thinking about are their products, services or companies and teams that bring the kind of entrepreneurial DNA, creativity and value that if we add to the Payoneer stack, the leverage on a common platform is pretty exceptional. And so, I do believe we will be more acquisitive over time, built by and partner to continue to scale.
Lex Sokolin:
Thank you, John for a fantastic conversation. If our listeners want to learn more about you or Payoneer, where should they go?
John Caplan:
I guess I’d say LinkedIn or reach out to us at Payoneer. We are really believe in the power of the fintech ecosystem and are interested in learning about folks who are doing innovative things and sharing what we’re learning, because we do think we should all be collaborating with one another. And Payoneer, you know, we’re visible and we are here to support your listeners, your audience, if they need workforce management support, global payment support, where they have creative ideas, they want to share with us, we are certainly eager and available.
Lex Sokolin:
Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining me today.
John Caplan:
Thanks, Lex.
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