Connected Economy Requires Global Scale Of Local Payments

Going public is often considered the finish line of a long journey for many companies, but Payoneer Vice President of Marketing Jonny Steel told PYMNTS that although his firm’s soon-to-be listing follows a 15-year stint as a private company, its special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) listing on the Nasdaq feels more like a starting point.

In a world that has become more interconnected by technology, it shouldn’t matter where a firm is based, what industry it is in or how large it is, Steel said, noting that Payoneer’s view is that every firm has a right to grow and flourish — and in turn, be presented with the right tools to access the global digital economy.

And it is Payoneer’s changing role in a changing world that has prompted the rebranding the firm has embraced ahead of its trip to the public markets, Steel said. When Payoneer started out a decade and half ago, the world was still on the cusp of the digital era — now we’re living in the center of it. As the company has grown and developed in that time, it has moved beyond payments that were the cornerstone of the old brand.

“We saw that a gap had opened up between the way we put ourselves out there and what we really have to offer,” he said. “And as we look to the future and see our role as a commerce-enabler, we felt this was the right time to reposition ourselves.”

The toolbox starts with payments but extends further as Payoneer aims to open a doorway to the digital economy for more firms worldwide, he said. The new brand represents both the expansion of the needs of digital businesses, and also the increasingly universal and interconnected nature of the global digital economy.

The One-Size-Fits-All Myth

The challenge in working at a global scale is that the world is not a uniform place. The needs of one segment vary quite widely from the needs of another.

“Typically, what lots of companies would do is understand the needs of businesses in the U.S. and Western Europe, and then more or less stop there,” Steel said, noting that platforms that are actually useful on a global scale must be highly local in their orientation.

What does a Ukrainian outsourcing firm need to grow? What does an exporter in China need in order to do business? What is the actual need of an Indian development center? Building global solutions isn’t about trying to fit every merchant into one mold that may or may not work — it’s about creating a set of solutions locally that can actually meet their needs.

Those needs may be connected to payments, but they can also exist outside of them. Payoneer’s expansion into working capital offerings came as a direct result of having local teams on the ground in 24 locations worldwide and hearing the persistent need of global businesses for a better, easier and more automated way to access funds, he said.

The path to growth is there. The pandemic rapidly accelerated digital commerce and highlighted just how interconnected and interdependent the entire global economy is. Steel said Payoneer’s new brand is now focused on making the universe of global opportunities accessible to businesses worldwide because opportunities are only as good for merchants as their ability to access and take advantage of them.

And there’s still a lot of work to be done in building that access the world over.

Where We Will Be

What comes next on the road to digitization remains unknown as the physical world is reopening for businesses, but we do know that there is no going backward when it comes to digitization. The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, and the world is forever altered.

And over the course of its first year facing the global market as a public firm, Payoneer’s goal is to meet those expanding opportunities with expanded offerings — in working capital, in B2B payments services and, most notably, in growing its payments orchestration services to businesses of all sizes.

“We’re expanding merchant services this year into small businesses, while continuing to develop our payment orchestration platform geared towards enterprises,” said Steel.