Mapping Growth Through Uncertain Seas | Bea Ordonez, CFO, Payoneer

Risk management is a really important area of focus for us as you would imagine given our business model. So really looking at how you unlock the power of data and ultimately AI to drive better underwriting decisions to manage risk in a more cohesive and dynamic way in an environment that keeps changing. So I think for us there's a very broad range of use cases. And look, as I think again about my career up until this point, my stints as a COO, as a Chief Innovation Officer have hopefully prepared me well to not be the naysayer to those kind of relatively nascent adoptions of technology, but to be an active supporter of pushing ahead in areas.

Thanks, Jack. It's great to be here. Good to see you again.

I'm ready. Fire away.

Sure. Look, it's a great question. I think it's fair to say that I've had a relatively unconventional path to the CFO role. I started as a CFO, I spent some time as a COO. I've returned via this sort of maybe unconventional path to a more traditional public company CFO role. And that whole journey has been I guess more than 20 years even though I spoke to you about five years ago as you said Jack. So you know I started my career in a startup role. I think that has continued to shape my view in a bunch of ways. I think as you really build a business and I was the CFO at this startup albeit not a public company as you build a business particularly in a relatively nascent space I think it teaches you that you need to have a high degree of sort of conviction in an area and potentially in a whole bunch of areas where there's not an obvious right answer. So I would say that began to shape me in my 20s and I think has been valuable. As I moved through my career I set up big operational teams and moved teams around over the years both operational teams and finance teams. And there's nothing quite like building a team from the ground up, right? Building a team of if it's a hundred people and for me it was over a couple of years really sort of thinking about what kind of team you want to have on every level, right? What kind of individuals, what kind of culture do you want to have, how do you want to interact with folks, what kind of opportunity do you want to have? So that was a sort of really formative phase in my career if you like. And as I think of sort of the what I'll call the transition back from more operational roles, as I said I was the COO leading a big global operational team for a whole bunch of years, close to 10 or 12 years overall and transitioned into more traditional CFO roles, really taking some of that business building strategic operational insight if you like and applying it to the role of the CFO where I think you'd agree Jack in talking to all the folks you talk where that role has really evolved I would say over the last couple of decades to really become a much more strategic role, a much more involved business partnership role. So I think taking all of those learnings from my role as Chief Innovation Officer at Webster and CFO at Sterling and my COO role for many years and applying them to sort of the CFO role as it is today.

I think maybe I look at it differently, right? I really took on a broad portfolio of activities and things for want of a better word in that role and really brought sort of my operational instincts and expertise, my finance instincts and expertise to what was at that time a very broad portfolio. Everything from sort of the product area within that large regional bank and really helping us think through how we should position the product to the digital innovation arm of that bank and how we should think about the evolution of digital products and customer-facing products more broadly to sort of more again nascent business lines in the banking as a service space and so on. So I feel like it spoke to some of my strengths and again everything is a journey. I think that's certainly what I've taken from my career. Spoke to some of my strengths and developed others in terms of really thinking about areas where you can really put your foot on the gas and look to accelerate innovation in a particular area that might feel from left field so to speak.

Yeah, look, I think for sure they have. There are acres of articles and other thought pieces about the evolving nature of the CFO role. I think as I think of my last I'll call it sort of 8 to 10 years in that CFO space more or less, right? The most important relationship you have is of course with your CEO. Maybe not of course, but it's certainly one of the more important. And why is that? Because they're really looking for a thought partner. So I think the real kind of evolution of that finance role has been away from simply sort of handling the financial reporting providing sort of financial inputs to the strategy to really sitting with the CEO and with the other members of the leadership team and thinking through all of the inputs finance and otherwise that should really form the company's strategy and the company's go forward sort of vision and mission if you like. So I think that has been the real evolution and I think that's why sort of a broad range of experiences and roles has at least for me prepared me well for kind of operating in that fast-moving fintech space and fast-moving sort of pace of innovation that we see today.

No, for sure. You've remembered it well. Look, I've always made it a point and I still try and do that to really understand what my team does on a day-to-day basis to really walk a mile so to speak and understand and it goes both for the team frankly and also for your customers in the kind of business we're in at Payoneer. It's also understanding sort of the experience as it is felt from the customer. And to do that, to do both of those things, you really have to get into the details that there's not a crash course or a series of slides that will really get you there. And so that's where I think I've both stayed the same and haven't, right? So I've stayed the same in the sense that you know the people that I work with would tell you that I ask a lot of questions that I get involved in a lot of stuff and that I really spend the time trying to understand kind of areas of sort of the workflows the processes the customer experience. And also where I've sort of adapted, I think, is developing an ability, I hope, to really synthesize a lot of different data inputs across the organization and to have those things be an input to sort of a broader vision, right? That can help inform capital allocation decisions, inform sort of our strategy, how we think about the business more broadly, how we think about the opportunity, how we externalize the vision, right? All of the things that are viewed as more sort of traditional CFO roles. How do you bring other data points and insights into kind of how you operate within that scope?

Yeah, I'd love to. It's a really interesting company and look I think I would start with we're really a mission-driven company. That's one of the things that attracted me to Payoneer. And that mission is really to connect SMBs and entrepreneurs especially in emerging markets but globally to a rising and increasingly digital economy. So our mission is really based in the view that talent is equally distributed globally but opportunity isn't and one of the ways in which opportunity is not evenly distributed is access to the financial system and access more discreetly to the digital economy. So at the heart of our mission is providing that on-ramp if you like to SMBs and freelancers and entrepreneurs and others and we serve more than two million of those customers with access to those opportunities in the form of access to global marketplaces where we aggregate demand in the forms of access really to the traditional financial system in a way that takes away the complexity and allows them to run their businesses and grow their businesses. So from our perspective, we sit at a really interesting intersection, especially lately, right? Really at the intersection of an increasingly digital economy, right? I think we saw that certainly after COVID with the adoption of more digital forms of commerce, digital payment adoption grew markedly in the period immediately after the pandemic. So we're at an intersection where for sure we see increasing digitization at a global level that's even more the case as people rise up out of poverty and have more access to internet and so on. We're seeing certainly global trade dislocations and opportunities. We're seeing more and more entrepreneurs looking to access those global opportunities as again they become more digital and more within our scope.

I think yes and no. Right. I think what feels familiar here is that we have a lot of that entrepreneurial spirit that I saw early in my career. Sort of really looking to drive growth, really looking for opportunity, being super customer centric and sort of figuring out how to drive that growth. So in that sense, we've kept some of that entrepreneurial edge. We're very global. You know, I've worked at relatively small companies that have been part of much bigger companies. The Bank of New York Mellon being one of those examples. But with very global footprints, right? So, Payoneer is a very global company. We serve, as I said, two million customers in 190 different countries and territories. We have employees in more than 30 jurisdictions. We are highly regulated and have a global licensed infrastructure in tons of jurisdictions. So in that sense we're an extremely global company and that speaks to some of my experience certainly in my early days and when I was a COO in terms of the scale. Look it's been interesting right I worked as I said at a relatively small startup company it was within a broader ecosystem but in terms of sort of the business side and how we were developing the plan and growing it it was very early stage and I've worked at much more mature organizations sort of within that regional banking space. So I think this feels certainly different in that sense. But a lot of the challenges and opportunities remain pretty consistent. And as I look to what has really been interesting to me in my career again it's sort of that intersection between traditional regulated financial service providers and technology. I think that's where we're seeing a lot of the innovation today. I think we're increasingly seeing that parts of that value chain are being enabled by different kind of entities whether it's technology providers, regulated fintechs, more traditional players and we're seeing really disruptive technologies come in and moving in very very quickly. So I think in that sense in that important sense Payoneer speaks to sort of really where I have found kind of the greatest interest and where I've really developed subject matter expertise over the years.

Look, I think you know what we see when there are these big changes is that there is you know opportunity created over time, right? So I think as we look to Payoneer's business our thesis remains intact related to global trade our thesis remains intact related to digitization of commerce and we're a highly diversified business serving many many different verticals across a very broad geographic footprint. So we view this as an opportunity to continue to serve that customer base and really look to first principles in terms of our business.

Yeah, look as you know what as we described it or as I described it, we're really looking to serve the financial needs of SMBs and entrepreneurs accessing the global digital economy. And the way we've positioned that and the vision at the heart of that mission is a full financial stack that can serve a very broad range of needs for those companies who in our research we have found to be relatively complex for quite small companies. Right. So we're definitely dealing with SMBs who are smaller even than the traditional definition of an SMB certainly in the US and yet they have very complex needs. They have employees in multiple jurisdictions. They often have multiple entities. They have cross-border AR and AP needs. So accounts receivable and accounts payable needs. They have quite complicated treasury management needs. And our platform serves them with a single sort of point of entry or point of access to really kind of manage those complexities in a very simple way. So the acquisition that you're referring to, the Squad acquisition last year was really an ancillary or adjacent service that we have added to that financial stack that allows companies within our ecosystem to manage their workforce, their global workforces in a super simple way that gives them full visibility and control in a tech enabled way. And it really speaks again to that financial stack vision and also to clear opportunities that we see within our B2B services segment.

Yeah, we've taken a tech leading or tech focused plan for integrating the capabilities of Squad. Really again, we go back to first principles in terms of the problems we're looking to solve for our customers and how can we integrate the capabilities that we brought on with that acquisition in a way that best serves the needs of our customers. That might be in terms of how we present that product and those capabilities. That might be in how that product leverages our own infrastructure and cross-border payments ecosystem. That might be in how we sort of sell and drive adoption of that. So we've taken look you take as given and certainly I do that from an integration perspective those core kind of internal capabilities that allow you to consolidate to understand the levers and drivers and the metrics of the business to really understand the trends that are driving that business that all has to happen and that happens for us sort of as part of a very defined set of work streams that kicks off post the acquisition. I think the next step needs to be very platform focused and for us is very platform focused and really focused on that customer experience and goes back to sort of where we started ensuring that we understand how that experience is felt by our customers when they are using our product.

For sure we've articulated that as part of our strategy. Again, if you think of that financial stack kind of it very much as a stack, right? We have foundational capabilities that support a lot of that complexity in terms of money movement. We have regulatory licenses as I've noted. We have a very broad network of banks and payment service providers that allow us to move money in our ecosystem across 7,000 trade corridors. So, we've built an incredibly valuable and an incredibly complex infrastructure that supports the core payment capabilities that an SMB operating globally needs. As we think of those additional sort of software enabled services, adjacent services and others, for sure we see partnerships and really being able to plug partnerships into our ecosystem as part of that accelerated kind of roadmap if you like. And for sure M&A I think can be a part of that as well as we look to additional capabilities that our SMBs are using and that they really need to accelerate their own growth trajectory. So Squad was a great example of that. We've talked externally around other potential avenues around spend management and again other services that our SMBs are using.

Yeah, for sure. Look, I think for sure we've made a lot of investments over the last couple of years, right? I think, you know, companies at our level of maturity. I think if they're doing it right, they're making real investments in data and data capabilities. You mentioned AI at the top of the hour. It is foundational to being able to harness that as a tool and as an accelerant. So we made real investments in the infrastructure that supports our data capabilities in our people and in some of the additional systems there to really help us harness the power of data to first and foremost support decision making provide a really robust framework for financial planning and capital allocation. But as we drove greater data literacy across the org to foster alignment and really ensure that we were all rowing in the same direction that has been a really powerful part of that journey and to serve as that foundation as I say to accelerate digital transformation and innovation. So as I think of that continuum of data for sure we have gotten more mature and robust in how we think about the size of the addressable market and the cross-border market and really think about trends in that market. We have become much more mature in our thinking about you know our share of wallet the levers that drive our performance and how we should think about trends in that performance. How we think about acquisition metrics, how we think about retention, really important for a business like ours to really think about logo retention, GMV retention, revenue retention, and as we go up that continuum to really get better data around, you know, customer behavior, right? How are we engaging with our customers? How are our customers engaging with our product, with us? How are we synthesizing that voice of customer to really drive our product roadmap? How are we, you know, how good of a job are we doing in understanding the problem, understanding the problem that we are solving and how do you translate all of those data inputs into really actionable strategy and an actionable product roadmap going forward. So I think it is for sure always a journey. And we've seen significant uplift in the maturity of our data organization more broadly.

Yeah, look, it's a great question, right? For sure I think nobody doubts how transformative AI is going to be. Overall, I was reading an article a couple of weeks ago that really talked about sort of the waves of adoption, if you like, of AI. I think it might have been a McKinsey article if I'm allowed to name check them. And it talked about those waves of adoption, right? And the first one was sort of the data foundation. How do you get your data foundation into a place where you can actually utilize those tools? The next phase was like analytics empowerment and sort of different use cases. And the final stage was intelligent automation, right? And it's clear that sort of most companies are going to be in either stage one or two and very very large in scale super tech focused companies are already shifting or at least making significant investments in developing too. For us as I sit here look governance is super important right we're a regulated financial service provider with again licenses and global financial licenses in many jurisdictions. So the governance around AI and the kind of data that you expose to that technology is very front and center. For us there's data protection implications and so on. We have I would say we're between wave one and two right we've done a lot of good work around the foundation. We're using AI capabilities in a number of ways across our company. We're using it, as I said, really to help us synthesize voice of customer and research. We're using it in the finance organization and more broadly around predictive modeling capabilities that really help us manage our acquisition funnel more effectively or predict churn and respond to it more effectively. We're beginning to use it in our customer support or customer journey function to really help us, you know, support our customers in a more effective way within that customer experience. We're using it in our engineering team to accelerate some of that engineering work. So we're in small ways across that kind of footprint really beginning to see some of the benefits and making active investments to better understanding where we can unlock capabilities. Risk management is a really important area of focus for us as you would imagine given our business model. So really looking at how you unlock the power of data and ultimately AI to drive better underwriting decisions to manage risk in a more cohesive and dynamic way in an environment that keeps changing. So I think for us there's a very broad range of use cases. And look, as I think again about my career up until this point, my stints as a COO, as a Chief Innovation Officer have hopefully prepared me well to not be the naysayer to those kind of relatively nascent adoptions of technology, but to be an active supporter of pushing ahead in areas where we see opportunity, but maybe the return is not completely obvious to us in all cases.

No, I think for sure, right, I think it's all about the lens that you bring or the perspective that you bring to that conversation. For sure, those are conversations that we have. How can we use not just AI but technology more broadly to do things more efficiently and more effectively and to serve our customers? Again, it comes down to customer centricity to solve problems for our customers in a way that delights them. Right? If we can do that, then we can do all of the things that as a public company you would wish us to do. Add more customers, take more share of wallet, really drive more utility and therefore unlock more value sort of internally for sure. We actually do have and we call them champions. We have champions around specific technology types and AI sort of tools to really help us learn as an organization. How can this help me in my day-to-day life at you know really looking at some of those tools? How can we unlock efficiency so that we can really put our minds to solving more complex problems and move certainly for finance people it's particularly true I would love for my FP&A team to devote much more of their time to sort of looking at the data and unlocking strategic insights from that data and much less time manipulating that data to understand sort of what it's really telling them. So the more we can use tools and the more we can use technology to create more time for people to allocate to strategic unlocks for the company, the better we will be. So I always try and bring that lens to the conversation. Because I think that's a sort of rising tide lifts all boats kind of lens.

I think continuing the journey, right? And I always sort of you've probably gathered zoom out a little bit from just finance and I have a broad portfolio of responsibilities here at Payoneer that include management of that network of banks and PSPs, management of the customer journey function. So my lens is always broader. But finance remains a very important part of the role. Obviously, as I look to the next 12 months, it's continuing to build on that foundation of data that we've been building towards and really iterating. One, to drive more automation in our processes, and two, to unlock more actionable insights to really inform how we think about our customer portfolios, how we think about our product roadmap and capital allocation perspective, how we think about sort of decisions as we navigate the macro uncertainty. All of those are things that you unlock with better data capabilities and greater analytical capability.

You know, as I thought a little bit about this question, I guess what ultimately came to mind to me, and maybe there's some recency bias here for sure, it is that it's not a single insight or moment, right? I've been at this for I'll say a longish amount of time, right? And there have been many crises and upheavals along the way, right? From the dot-com bubble to the Asian financial crisis and the global recession in the 2000s and the great recession in 2008 to the COVID pandemic. Right? And I think it's not always clear when we have those really big upheavals what the lasting impact of them will be. Right? I think that's the case even with COVID which is now somewhat in the rearview mirror. I think in the rearview mirror, I think when you're talking about those very seismic shifts, it's impossible even now to fully assess the global impact, but for sure there were some things that didn't return to sort of the pre-pandemic kind of paradigm, if you like. It's impacted how we work. It's impacted poverty and inequality. It's impacted supply chains and global trade, right? And it was also an accelerant for innovation and transformation, right? I talked already about digital payments and e-com and so on. So I guess my insight especially right now, right? It is that crises and upheavals are a fact of life if you like. And that they'll probably feel much more frequent to us now in the age that we live in and may even be more frequent. Right? It's very hard to apply the lens of sort of how history will look back to the life you live today. So, it may be that they only feel more frequent or it may be that they are actually more frequent. I've been here two years as you've noted, Jack. And the US banking crisis was less than two years ago. That felt kind of seismic here in the US for a while, right? And so they feel more frequent and again maybe they are and maybe it's how interconnected we are sort of globally and maybe it's the pace of technology and innovation and maybe it's all sorts of things. So I think you know my takeaway from that is that it's even more important to really be able to navigate against that changing environment, right? I think we're going to continue to see it. I think we're going to continue to live with a degree of ambiguity across many many verticals and industries and macro environments and it's going to be really important to build resilient and high performing teams and to be resilient right it's as a leader you have to be really resilient and sort of lean in and problem solve. My view is that change will almost always present an opportunity. And for Payoneer I feel that very acutely that change will bring opportunity and it's really in how we respond to that change how we support our customers how we make speed a competitive advantage against that environment how we respond to the shifting macro and adapt and how we continue to focus first and foremost again on serving those customers sticking to first principles and really driving forward. So I think my reflection and insight is that change is a constant. That's not a revolutionary observation for sure. But I think it's become a more frequent observation. And for sure as I look at you know for me a longish career as I say the degree to which the companies I've worked at have or haven't successfully navigated that change has defined how they emerged from that period. So it's critically important.

Wow, that's a super interesting question. When did I feel like a leader? You know, it's I think you have to somewhat everyone talks about data-driven decision making and leadership and it's super important. I've talked a lot even in the last you know x many minutes with you Jack around the importance of data and I believe that completely but also the fact that you have to live in ambiguity a little bit right and so to me what has defined leadership is an ability to make decisions with imperfect information and sometimes a lot of ambiguity along the way right and I think as you mature more as a leader, you develop greater conviction in your ability to do that. And greater sort of ability to take that on and to really lean into that. I think for me that's what defines the difference between sort of a leader and the organization more broadly, being able to take that on.

I think both, right? I think both for sure as I said I think change will continue to be a constant and that the pace of change will likely accelerate for a whole bunch of you know mostly obvious reasons. So I think the test of resilient companies and we will celebrate 20 years this year actually in a couple of weeks at Payoneer. So we have been a resilient company for two decades and built an enduring business and pivoted our strategy over time to capture opportunity and drive growth and it will also be a test of resilient leadership in a very broad sense. So I think yeah the answer is both.

Yeah. I always like this question because I think there's lots of ways to get there. So, I guess that's my first piece of advice, right? There's not a single path. There's no right path that the right path is whatever you think it makes the most sense. I didn't set out to be a public company CFO. I didn't really set out and it's not career advice necessarily. I didn't set out with a particular plan. I did what I enjoyed and I always leaned into solving the problem as I understood it. So my sort of first bit of advice would be don't stress too much about you know the path that you should take to be the thing. My second and I think it's important I wish someone had sort of coached me more. I'm not sure I would have taken the advice would be to be an advocate for yourself and for the people around you, particularly people in your team. That's how you build trust and collaboration. And that's I guess my third piece of advice, right? Companies are in a very real sense organisms, right? You need to be good at figuring out the health of that organism. And to do that, you need to talk to a lot of people. You need to be curious. You need to build trust. You need to, as I said before, get good at synthesizing lots and lots of different data points. You won't always be right, but you've got to form a view and then have that view be sufficiently malleable that you can take impacts inputs and move forward, you know, with that view and really progress and work in collaboration with others. So, that's my advice. No single path. Be an advocate for yourself and be curious. It's a big world.

It was a pleasure talking to you, Jack.