Driving Payoneer Growth in a Changing World with CFO Bea Ordonez

Thank you so much Jack. It's really great to be here.

I'd love to, Jack. Look, so you know, Payoneer is really importantly a mission-driven financial platform, and I'll come back to the mission in a little moment. But as you noted in your introduction, we're connecting small and medium-sized businesses, so SMBs, and entrepreneurs, especially in emerging markets, and we cover a very diverse and broad geographical footprint to what we like to think of as a rising and frankly increasingly global and increasingly digital economy. And when I talk about mission, and we talk about our mission, it's really based on our view that talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. And one of the ways in which opportunity is not equally distributed is in access to the financial system. Right, we read about it here even in the US with unbanked folks and so on, but on a global scale, access to the financial system is definitely not equally distributed. And for small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs globally, the ability to do straightforward things that are critical to their business, to pay, to get paid, to manage their global operations, it's both critical and really, really complex. And so while we see, and I think we all see, that global commerce has become ever more digital, we see that with the rise of global marketplaces, whether it's all the names we know and love like Amazon and Etsy and eBay, or less well-known global marketplaces like Mercado Libre or Shopee, we see those marketplaces rising, we see them aggregating both supply and demand, and we see even the globalization of labor. Right, we know that the pandemic accelerated those trends. And while all of that commerce, all of that ability to trade across borders has become easier in many ways, the process of sending and receiving payments globally is really still incredibly complicated. So at Payoneer, what we do very simply is we look to solve for that complexity with a purpose-built financial stack that is designed to meet the needs of SMBs, those small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, and make it easier for them to operate on a global scale. And we do it at scale. Right, where you noted in your introduction that we're relatively well known, I think in the US we're not all that well known. In the markets in which we serve and have customers in critical mass, we are quite well known. We operate at real scale. We have roughly 2 million customers. We'll move roughly $70 billion of GMV, gross market value, through our ecosystem, and we allow trade across roughly 7,000 trade corridors. So really what we're looking to do in the simplest of terms is giving those SMBs in emerging markets on a global scale with a real on-ramp to the digital economy and a real way of powering their business and operating globally and at scale.

You know, guesses that cover the globe. Australian probably is the top guess. I'm not Australian. South African is also a guess. I'm also not South African. My background is I was born in England, in London specifically, to Spanish parents, and left in my 20s. Spent time in Bermuda, spent time in Florida, spent time in New York, which I've now made my home. Married a Canadian, worked in global companies, so I am a giant melting pot of every accent imaginable, I guess. How about that?

I did. I grew up in London. I grew up in Tottenham, which if you have soccer fans who are listening in to the podcast, it is a well-known team. And it's a part of London. I had a, you know, I was the child of immigrant parents. As I said, my parents are Spanish. They moved to England in the 60s and had a pretty regular sort of public school, you know, rough and tumble London existence right the way through 18 when I left for college.

I actually studied law. So I attended a university in England. I studied law, and in a lot of ways I'm a frustrated barrister. I certainly watched lots of courtroom dramas growing up and I was always fascinated. And it's a discipline that has really served me well in sort of my chosen field in terms of that real intersection between financial services, regulated financial services, and fintech. That kind of discipline and that regulatory background has really been helpful. But law was always fascinating to me, and that was my undergraduate and graduate program.

Yeah, I think that's a critical skill really at almost any role in the C-suite, right? Really looking to solve problems through innovation, through a different kind of mindset, and really being open to exploring different ways of tackling a particular problem. I spent quite a long part of my career in a much more operational role as COO of trading companies and capital markets companies. And I found that fascinating because it was again the intersection between financial technology, customer experience, and the ability to do complex things, to accomplish complex transactions in a compliant and regulatory compliant way. And it's almost like a puzzle to solve for the right balance between customer experience and risk and regulatory compliance to ensure that you're really balancing all of those needs in an appropriate way.

No, look, that's right, Jack. And I think that broad experience has really sort of positioned me to love what I do and to hopefully excel at what I do. I think the role of the CFO has certainly evolved over time, has become yes an accounting and finance role, but a much broader strategic role and a real in-depth understanding really what makes the business work operationally, what makes the business work from a data perspective, what are the data insights that you can glean, how can you look at data as a strategic asset within the organization, what are the levers of the business that can really ignite and drive growth, and how should you think about that strategically. So as I look at, you know, as you noted, I've had perhaps a less conventional path to the CFO. I was a CFO at 26 in a relatively small company, a startup, which was a really fascinating experience on a bunch of levels. I transitioned into a broader operational role at that point and really learned how to run and how to interface frankly with technology teams to solution design and drive outcomes that are going to both ignite growth, unlock leverage in the company, really open up new markets, and potentially launch new sort of business lines and products. I've touched sort of each of those elements. It's the area of the business that's really been the most fascinating for me to really look at how you touch the diverse parts of the company.

Um, I think there's always important people at all sorts of levels, whether it's official mentors or CEOs that we've all been fortunate enough to work with along the way, who can be very different and very unique characters in all sorts of important ways. And frankly, whether it's sort of other people in the organization, I've always tried to cast a pretty wide net in any organization I've worked in to really try and find, I like to call them the hidden gems in the organization, who maybe think a little bit differently, who have a perspective that's differentiating in some way, and really to talk as widely as you can. I think intellectual curiosity is super important. I would say sort of the most formative experience in my career was really that startup organization, because I worked for a great boss who really taught me a lot about critical thinking and how to, he used to call it peel the onion, how to sort of look at a problem and really dig in and ask questions and get as good an understanding as you could in the moment. But working for a startup, particularly, you know, the startup I worked at, we were launching a product that provided electronic and algorithmic access into equities markets globally. Right, and today you have that in the palm of your hand. Right, you can go to any number of apps and you can buy a stock on the Japanese exchange and it's two clicks. So it's extraordinary. But 20 plus years ago, give or take, when I joined, the company was called G-Trade, when we were starting out, that was very new. The idea of electronic real-time access to those equity markets was super new. And working in that environment where there wasn't a defined roadmap, a defined answer for how to do the things that we were trying to do, really taught me one, a ton of resilience, and two, sort of confidence in your own decision-making ability even if you don't have perfect data or someone who can tell you that it's the right way to go. And I think those things are really hard to come by and really critical to driving change and having a sort of innovation-first mindset.

It's such a great, great question, Jack. Look, I think you know, the pace of innovation in today's sort of global environment is really just astonishing, right? And as I said, I've worked for a long time at the intersection of what I'll call traditional regulated financial services and technology companies. And it's a fascinating intersection. And what we increasingly see as consumers, right, I think companies are obviously consumers, we are all consumers, but you increasingly see in that ecosystem that different parts of that value chain that kind of creates the customer experience are really being enabled by different entities in that broader landscape, right? So tech companies, fintech companies, and more traditional financial players are working and collaborating to deliver that integrated experience to customers. And that's a big shift, right? The idea that a marketplace works with lenders who enable one part of the value chain, or payment providers who enable another, or banks or credit card companies who enable yet another, and so on. So that the ability to unlock a frictionless customer experience with all of those elements of that customer experience, I think has been fascinating. And it's a trend that I think we continue to see in the market. I think that only accelerates, right? The pandemic drove additional or really an uptick in digital adoption, an uptick in e-commerce more generally. And we have the digital-first generation coming of age, right? I have two kids, 10 and 13, they don't know of an age that doesn't involve something that's more powerful than any computer we had 40 years ago literally in the palm of their hands. So all of those trends, including digital adoption more globally in emerging markets, is really going to accelerate. I think the pace of that and really continue to digitize the process of exchanging value to keep up with those innovations from a marketplace perspective. And Payoneer really sits in that ecosystem looking to unlock that real value for SMBs.

Yeah, absolutely. So look, as you said, I had an interesting and maybe unconventional journey along the way. And my time at Webster was fascinating, again sitting at that intersection between innovation and traditional financial services at a time where I think banks in the US are really wrestling with a rapidly changing environment, regulators are wrestling with a rapidly changing environment in terms of consumer preferences, digitization, blockchain, crypto, sort of these novel assets. So it was a fascinating time. As I got to speak to the folks here at Payoneer, including our CEO John Kaplan, I really learned, I wasn't familiar with the company coming into it. It's really a fascinating company. One, because you know, as we've discussed, mission is really very much at the center of what drives the Payoneer ethos. It's not very well known as I noted in the US, but it has a real sort of scale and footprint and is solving a genuine need for small businesses at scale. And it's super global, which is sort of, as I think on my sort of 20 plus year career, where I've really enjoyed roles and where I've really enjoyed company cultures, it's when they're truly global. And we have boots on the ground in somewhere close to 30 countries. So in an average day, I could be talking to colleagues in China, I could be talking to colleagues in India, in London, here in New York City. So it's been really fascinating. And then ultimately for me, as I think it is for most people as we sort of get to this point in our careers, it's about the people that you work with and really the mission again and the vision of the management team and the leadership really resonated for me.

So he's been in the role a little more than two years. I've been in the role about a year and a half. We've certainly been a company that's been transforming our business to really capture the very real opportunity as we see it in that B2B space for SMBs doing business globally across emerging markets. But look, with John, he's a fantastic CEO. My experience, I've been fortunate to work for great CEOs over the course of my career. And I've always taken the same approach, which is sort of complete candor, complete honesty. We don't always agree, and that's okay, right? We're able to have a relationship that's built on trust and complete candor, and then we move forward. And that goes for all of us within the management team and the leadership team here at Payoneer. As I've said often to CEOs over the course of my career, it's not my job to yes you. It's our job, all of us, to challenge each other and to have diversity of opinion in the room, because only then will we get, in my opinion, to the best outcome for the business. So it's really again a relationship of trust and assuming the best of intentions and moving forward to get the best outcome that we can for our customers first and foremost, for our people, and then ultimately for the company.

I was doing that just recently as well. I'm like, gosh, no, we're in 2024.

Look, I think first and foremost you have to measure, right? And that's hard. And there's a million sort of business management books on everything from OKRs to balanced scorecard to any number of metrics. But first and foremost you have to measure and really sort of align around what it is that you think you should measure, which in and of itself is a hard question. And then align around how you're going to measure that throughout the organization and how that waterfalls and drives sort of that vision and that strategic focus across the organization. And in a big global company with disparate folks sitting in, as I've said, numerous locations, that's incredibly challenging. But really measuring it is critical. And celebrating success, right, that's obviously a part of it. But equally, and I think almost as important, all companies I think are relatively good at celebrating success. Acknowledging mistakes and failures, I think is really important. Not in a finger-pointing, blame-allocation kind of a way, but in a, look, we took a data-driven approach to this particular challenge, or we took this approach to solving this problem expecting outcome A and we got outcome B. Let's think about what sort of series of decisions got us there. Which I think, and that's something that we've really worked on developing here, it's a culture of experimentation. It's been super impactful, I think, to really understand how the thing that you do impacts the customer experience, the customer's behavior, you know, the value that you're unlocking for them, to measure that, and to take data from that and drive it back into the process. So it's taking that data-driven approach to decision-making that I think is so critical. And then sort of so that it doesn't sound frankly so robotic, I think that the key other element that's missing in everything I just said is empathy. Right, I think you build a high-performing team by being authentic. I'm a big believer, I used to call it my Popeye theory, I am what I am. I'm a big believer that everybody in the company needs to be who they are, right? We all need to be rowing in the same direction, but leading with empathy and understanding and allowing people to be their authentic selves with everything that that means, and driving that culture of frankly trust and collaboration. It's a balance, right? You've got to be super objective in what you're measuring, and you've got to be, in my view, leading as an empathetic leader that's walking a mile in your team's shoes as much as you possibly can.

I want to try and do the accent and I definitely don't smoke a pipe, but yeah.

Um, yeah, look, again, a great question. And so many changes to the good over 20 plus years. You know, as I said, I started out from a C-suite perspective in the capital markets space in trading companies, and it was pretty common, in fact frequent, for me to be the only woman in the room. And that was the case for years, right? And today we have two women leading the largest stock exchanges in the US, the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange, right? And that's astonishing in a lot of ways. It would have been almost unthinkable in some of the trading rooms that I saw, you know, in my late 20s and early 30s. But still a long way to go. I think we all see the data. While board representation has improved and C-suite representation has improved, I think the pandemic lowered labor participation rates for women meaningfully. I think we still have a long way to go from an income parity perspective. So I think it's still really important for us to be thinking along those lines. I think, you know, a few things in terms of how should we all think about supporting women and others in the workplace, right? It's providing visible role models for them. I think that's really important. It's something that I would have loved to have had as I came up in my career, someone who looked a bit or sounded a bit like me in the C-suite as a role model to strive for. It's providing practical support, right? And that means family leave and benefits and flexible working environments. That I think, you know, giving lip service to noble intentions is a wonderful thing and it's certainly a start. Providing practical support for people to meaningfully participate in the labor market is better still. It's certainly mentorship, and you talked a little bit about mentorship. And sort of on a more broad level, it's really celebrating the diversity that exists in companies like ours and in general. I think all of those things are super important.

Yeah, look, Jack, it's so true. I think the fintech landscape, particularly certainly since 2021 and arguably for longer, has been super, super volatile, right? And I think 2023 has been characterized by a whole host of different types of uncertainty, whether it's macro uncertainty, inflationary pressures, you know, rising interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty. As a company that sits really at the nexus of global trade, we think about those things a lot. And we think about how we can best sort of build a resilient business. And in a lot of ways, diversity is a natural resilience driver within our business more broadly. But I think you've got to build resilience within your teams. I think you've got to acknowledge that you can't see around corners and really work with the best data that you have at your disposal. Again, it really comes down to the data that can help you make the best possible decision-making, understanding that you don't know what's around those corners. And as Mike Tyson famously said, and I hear this quite a lot lately, everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face. You've got to be able to pivot and to really look at your business model and satisfy yourself that you can grow through different cycles, that you can, you know, unlock leverage through different operating environments, that you have enough vectors of growth over enough timelines and different time horizons to really think about your investment priorities and adapt accordingly and build again that resilient business model.

Sure. Look, you know, our strategy for growth is really anchored in being customer-centric, right? We talked a little bit about the real problems we solve for SMBs and entrepreneurs who are underserved by the legacy financial system. So we believe in really focusing on solving for those problems. We are where our customers are. That's why we have so many, you know, boots on the ground in so many countries. We work hard to understand what those problems are and to drive solutions. And we recognize that if you're in the financial services business, as banks know only too well, you're in the business of trust, right? That means that customers want certainty of execution, and that means that they need to have a high degree of trust in you as a financial institution. So we focus again on that customer centricity to drive growth. And we're really excited about the opportunity that we have to continue to penetrate that B2B space for small businesses that are really looking to unlock growth in their own businesses by accessing demand in other markets. So we generated 21% top-line growth in Q2, also in Q1. We're excited about the momentum we have in our business, and we're staying focused on solving for customers. That to me is the key.

Um, you know, it starts, and we've talked a little bit about it already, it starts with data, right? And really organizations who are going to excel sort of in the next curve of our innovation are those that are able to unlock data as a strategic asset within their organization. And it's really hard because most financial services organizations have disparate data, have developed that data over a long period of time, have systems that don't always talk to each other effectively. But CFOs sit in a really powerful position to be able to champion the notion of data as a strategic asset and to actually drive investment to that, right? To unlock insights, to drive engagement in their customer-facing engines, to drive stickiness and greater adoption, to really kind of engage the customer. That's what we see in a lot of these trends with social media platforms and the rise of e-commerce within those, with super apps, with the gamification of retail investment is another example. It all starts with data as a foundational asset. And I think AI on top of that, machine learning, is fascinating. The governance, I have to go back to my discipline as a lawyer, the governance is going to be key, right? For financial services organizations and in general, there are data privacy elements to this that really need to be thought through. There are governance and other risk and resiliency elements. But we think it's a super exciting area that we're exploring in our customer journey. How do we automate and streamline our interactions with customers with predictive modeling that can really help us grow in our business? And really interestingly, in the compliance and risk monitoring, I think machine learning models will really help financial institutions better solve for risk and transaction monitoring within their businesses. So I think a super exciting area for us all to watch for.

I love that tagline. Look, I think the evolution of the CFO's role will continue. The CFO needs to be a really strong strategic partner to the business, needs to be, you know, leading and advocating for innovation within their organization. I think gone are the days that CFOs are sitting in their rooms, you know, looking only at the financial reporting historically. They need to be, you know, focusing on the business with an innovation mindset and helping the business make decisions to unlock growth. So I think it's an exciting place to be for CFOs and that we're going to see the pace of innovation only accelerate from here on out.

Gosh, um, I am definitely not a joke teller, so I won't impose that on your listeners. Fun fact, I have a brown belt in Judo. I haven't done that in a long time, but folks are often surprised. I did competitive Judo for a long time in my younger days. And a hobby, I really like going to basketball games. So I have adopted, you know, in New York City, my adopted home, we love going to see the Brooklyn Nets, who had a less than stellar season last year, but we're hoping for a better season this year. And it's been a really enjoyable thing to do with my 10-year-old.

Not the Knicks. No, we live in Manhattan, but the Brooklyn Nets, I don't know, captured our heart. So we're die-hard Nets fans.

As I think of work-life balance, again, I think if you're providing a supportive environment for your team, leading with empathy, and really leading with understanding, again, walking a mile in folks' shoes, that you can allow people to really have the sort of work-life balance that they're hoping to get and to be supportive through that.

Yeah, you know, look, I think in common with other folks who have been on your podcast, I think intellectual curiosity is key, not just to CFOs but in general. You know, keep learning. As I said earlier, cast a wide net. You can learn a lot from people that are sometimes buried in all sorts of strange parts of your organization. And in general, to really understand sort of an area that you didn't understand before, get a deep operational understanding of your business. I think one of the reasons that I've been able to sort of progress in my career is really taking the time to understand elements of the business that can seem mundane and routine, but are really the machinery that drives the car. And then finally, to take on more. I never said no to anything along the way in terms of new responsibility or new things to do. I always took on more if there was an opportunity, even if there wasn't a clear path to what it would mean to me. I almost always said yes. You can take risks, particularly early in your career. I think it's not a universal truth that women perhaps tend to be a little more risk-averse around career moves than men, but in general, I think you can afford to be much more risk-on with your career earlier on in your career before you have all the financial responsibilities that you have as you get older. And you'll benefit from that diversity of opportunity and from pushing yourself potentially outside of your comfort zone and into industries that maybe are interesting to you but aren't where you've honed your skills. So I think sort of a broad approach and being a little more risk-on in how you think about the world will serve you well.

It's been an absolute pleasure, Jack. I've really enjoyed listening to your podcast and look forward to many more. And I hope it was useful for your listeners.