Payoneer at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth in B2B Payments

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Payoneer Global Inc (NASDAQ:PAYO) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, emphasizing its strategic growth in the global B2B payments sector. CEO John Kaplan highlighted Payoneer’s strong financial performance and expansion initiatives, while addressing investor concerns about stock valuation and market perceptions.

Key Takeaways

• Payoneer reported nearly $1 billion in revenue for 2024, with a 27% compound annual revenue growth rate.
• The company holds $500 million in cash with no debt, supporting its growth and shareholder returns.
• Strategic partnerships, including with Alibaba.com, enhance Payoneer’s value proposition.
• The company focuses on expanding into high-growth emerging markets and acquiring larger, higher-value customers.
• CEO Kaplan reassured investors about the strength of Payoneer’s China business and interest revenue.

Financial Results

• 2024 Performance: $80 billion in volume across the platform and $7 billion in customer funds held.
• Revenue Growth: 16% revenue increase in Q1 2025 and 27% annual growth over recent years.
• Profitability: $270 million of core business adjusted EBITDA in 2024, with $14 million positive adjusted EBITDA compared to a $25 million loss in 2023.
• Balance Sheet: Strong financial position with $500 million in cash and no debt.

Operational Updates

• Market Penetration: Payoneer serves customers in 90 countries, with significant growth in Latin America and APAC.
• Customer Base: Over 2 million customers, with 550,000 generating 90% of revenue.
• Product Innovation: Expansion of accounts payable solutions and robust growth in the Payoneer card business.

Future Outlook

• Strategic Focus: Adding and supporting cross-border SMBs, moving upmarket, and expanding into new regions.
• Financial Targets: Aiming for mid-teens revenue growth and 25% adjusted EBITDA margins.
• Investment: Continued investment in technology and innovation to drive growth and efficiency.

Q&A Highlights

• Investor Concerns: Kaplan addressed misconceptions about Payoneer’s business model and China exposure.
• Market Position: Emphasized the company’s unique position and consistent delivery of promised results.
• Engagement: Encouraged investors to engage with the investor relations team to better understand Payoneer’s value.

Readers are invited to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Payoneer’s strategic initiatives and financial performance.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Chris Kennedy, Research Analyst, William Blair: Alright. Thanks everyone for joining us today both in person and online. My name is Chris Kennedy. I’m the research analyst at William Blair covering the fintech and payment space. For a complete list of research disclosures and or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com.

Next up, we have Payoneer. From the company, we have the CEO, John Kaplan, and the CFO, Pete Ordonez. Payoneer does a lot of things, but at the core, they help their customers connect to the global economy. Now the tariff situation has created a little bit of uncertainty, but overall, the financial results have been solid. The company had over 270,000,000 of EBITDA last year, and that compares to about 28,000,000 back in 2021.

Yet shares are trading below kinda where they came out in the market debut. So with that, let me turn it over to John.

John Kaplan, CEO, Payoneer: It’s great to be here. Thank thanks for thanks for welcoming me, and it’s great to see so many of you here today. I’m excited about Payoneer, excited to share the company with you. We are a great business benefiting from some significant secular trends. The digitization of global commerce is one.

The next is the globalization of workforces around the globe and the services economy, and then most significantly, the diversification of global trade. And Chris mentioned the reshaping of trade that’s underway through the tariff environment. That is a short term headwind as we’ve talked about, but an extraordinary long term tailwind for our firm. We’re well positioned to benefit. Speaking to investors specifically, we represent a very good investment opportunity.

We are in the highest growth, fast growing emerging markets around the world. We do business in a 90 countries and territories. We are leading the disruption of the global b to b payments sector, and we’ll talk about the momentum we have there. And we have, most importantly, a branded relationship with SMBs themselves, which is, in addition to our licenses, our bank relationships, our 7,000 corridors of trade, we are, well positioned to continue to benefit as trade is more and more about the mission of the firm and the intensity that we operate about going after that mission. The first is the purpose that 2,400 colleagues in world join me on this mission is to connect the world’s cross border businesses to a rising global economy.

And one of the silver linings of the last couple of months is I think folks around the world now recognize just how interconnected we all are and that the that the ideas or the the the concepts around retreating or decoupling are not practical, approaches to how global trade will operate. As I mentioned, we have customers in a 90 countries and territories. All of them are engaged in cross border trade. And for folks here in Chicago or in The US that may not realize, in most of the globe, when you start a business, you start as a global company. You’re either sourcing from or selling to or hiring people outside of your home borders.

Here in Chicago, we you could get rich between Milwaukee, Chicago, and Pittsburgh and never get a passport. But in Ho Chi Minh City or Mexico City or Lahore, Pakistan, that largely is not true. And what Payoneer stands to benefit by building the financial solution for those companies that are underserved by global banks, their local banks don’t have either the technology or capability or, ability to serve them, and we do. Our customers are all engaged in cross border trade. They’re marketing companies, IT companies, business process outsourcers in The Philippines, Software Engineers in Brazil, Goods Exporters from China.

They are selling wholesale direct to to the business customers or through marketplaces. We take the fundamental complexity out of cross border trade for our customers, And that’s a very significant benefit because generally customers who are trying to operate globally need to be able to sell to and get and hire globally. And the financial services infrastructure of the globe is not designed for them. And our financial results prove our value prop. Our business has seen great volume growth money that flows into the Payoneer platform, $80,000,000,000 in 2024.

We hold $7,000,000,000 or thereabouts of customer funds for our customers. We pay no yield on those funds yet monetize that that interest. We’ve seen our revenue compound annual growth rate of 27% over the last number of years. Again, exceptional exceptional revenue growth in the firm, and our adjusted EBITDA continues to be impressive. As Chris mentioned, $270,000,000 of core business adjusted EBITDA.

When, Bea Ordonez, our CFO, and I took our leadership roles in March of twenty twenty three, Payoneer was coming off a year of single digit revenue growth and core business unprofitable. In 2025, we turned $25,000,000 of negative core adjusted EBITDA into $14,000,000 of positive adjusted EBITDA while we grew revenue 20%. Q one of twenty twenty five, we had 16% revenue growth and $7,000,000 of core business adjusted EBITDA. We are seeing steady volume growth, increasing customer funds on our platform. Revenue is outpacing volume growth greater than two x since going public to nearly $1,000,000,000 of revenue in 2024.

For those newer to the Payoneer story, our business model is primarily ad valorem, and we have demonstrated significant take rate expansion unlike other financial services firms that see take rate compression. In fact, we’ve steadily grown our take rate during our tenure leading the business. And I’ll and as the as the numbers demonstrate significantly faster profitability growth, we’ve nearly 10 x our adjusted EBITDA during the same period here. And I think that’s a really important thing when you look about the value unlock, which is coming out of our operational discipline, our pricing discipline, our data and an extraordinary group of leaders globally who are who are obsessed with providing value and support for global cross border SMBs. Our strategy and how we’re growing the firm is really direct.

We are focused on adding and supporting cross border SMB businesses. Those are folks that have a thousand employees, like a customer I met from Serbia recently who’s got customers all across Europe, to individual freelancers who may be in Brazil or Argentina or business process outsourcers in The Philippines. We are expanding and helping our customers move into markets where they’re not. You know, today, 15% of our revenue comes from China based sellers that are selling to the rest of the world, but not The United States. We have a very strong franchise there and one that we anticipate continued strong growth.

We’re investing in additional products for our customers. Last August, we acquired a workforce management platform that enables us to help our customers who have global employees to be able to pay those folks. So we are moving our business upmarket with larger and larger customers, which bring more volume, revenue, and net revenue retention into the firm and diversifying the products we offer, and the result of which is exceptional growth to our ARPU, strong take rate dynamics, and efficiencies in our business. Our business is just about as diversified as you could get. 90 countries and territories, goods companies, services companies, individual freelancers, and, groups of software developers.

Across segments and brands, we have a branded relationship with b to b customers around the world. Those are SMBs that sell on marketplaces and those that are using direct to consumer merchant services. We have an enterprise payouts business, which leverages the rails, the payment rails on our networks of relationships we’ve built, helping, enterprises that wanna leverage the Payoneer platform in our network to move money around the globe. We serve customers in five key markets. Those customers sell around the globe.

So they may be in Dubai or they may be in Vietnam or they may be in Indonesia, but they are businesses that are actively participating in global trade. In q one, our business in Latin America and APAC saw 20% revenue growth. And that 20% revenue growth, was greater than the firm’s overall 16% revenue growth, I think indicates how diverse our firm is. We earn money from, we we earn our money from funds coming into the Payoneer platform. We earned interest income on on the balances we hold for our customers.

And unlike and I think there’s some misconception about this, I might as well address this head on. Unlike a payroll company where dollar comes in at eight in the morning and leaves by 3PM, our customers hold many months of balances on the Payoneer platform because they are using our accounts payable products to manage their international, expenses. And we we even see now hundreds of millions of dollars moving from analog traditional banks into Payoneer accounts because our customers want to use our best in breed AP tools. The complexity of cross border trade, I think the the world has gotten a fast lesson in that over the last eight weeks. And our multi currency accounts receivable, treasury, FX, and accounts payable all happen through a single Payoneer account in the palm of your hand.

So you’re the CFO of a multinational SMB business and you’re based anywhere around the globe. You can operate your business successfully. We’ve built a moat around the business that’s getting bigger. Over the last twenty years, licenses in The US, EU, UK, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and now in China. The third foreign company after Visa and PayPal to have this license, we’ve announced that most recently.

We have relationships with the world’s largest marketplaces. Our friends at Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Airbnb, Walmart, MercadoLibre, Coupang, Phil, you name a marketplace, we are likely doing business with them. We have a global network over over a hundred bank relationships. This network is difficult to replicate and one we treasure and work diligently with our banking partners to provide solutions for SMBs around the world. And then we have integrations with QuickBooks or Zoho or other tools that SMBs around the world.

Think of that as the ecosystem of software that an entrepreneur needs so that she can participate in global trade. Further strengthening all of the things I’ve mentioned that we’ve put in place, the account itself is such a high value and utility that it drives its own stickiness. The more someone uses it, the stickier our business becomes, which is the reason why last August we bought a workforce management company based in Singapore, which enabled us to offer to our customers and net new customers the ability to pay global employees as the as people hire around the world. You don’t need to hire just geographically anymore. COVID proved that to all of us.

Now the most innovative firms are finding talent in Latin America and APAC and globally to operate their businesses. So I I feel good about where we are and the ecosystem we’ve built. At a recent conference, we announced that we had just signed a new partnership with Alibaba.com to help India based entrepreneurs participate and get access to the Payoneer platform. I think shareholders will be pleased to know that we continue to make steady headway in expanding our marketplace relationships. The single Payoneer account is the core value prop, a multicurrency account that has everything a business needs to either pay someone, either someone in the existing Payoneer network, which is a capability we have, which is 10 plus billion dollars of additional volume, on our platform in addition to the $80,000,000,000 I referenced a moment ago, enables them to get paid.

Whether they sell wholesale or b to b, one business to another, whether they sell direct to a consumer if they’re in the ecommerce or goods space, or if they distribute their capability via marketplace. And that could be a services provider on Fiverr or a goods exporter who’s who’s selling on, Amazon. The account is mobile and desktop. And what’s fascinating about I don’t wanna age myself, but I prefer to do my financial transactions personally from a desktop. But most of the globe where entrepreneurs are getting younger and more mobile, it’s actually all the capability in the palm of your hand is actually what the entrepreneurs need.

And what’s so significant about that is that our mobile capability furthers the gap between us and the old world traditional bank folks that we’re taking share from, who not only don’t have the capability, don’t have the engineers, and are decades away, or maybe that’s overstating it, from having the mobile ability. Our ICPs, our ideal customers, of which we have 550,000 plus of our 2,000,000 active customers log into their Payoneer account every other day. And I think the engagement we have with our customers is further testimony to the value that we’re providing. We acquire and serve our customers in a 90 countries and territories. As I mentioned before, the they are in APAC, which is 31% of our total ICPs, China, is 20%, EMEA twenty nine %, Latin America fourteen %, here in The United States and North America 6 Percent.

We have over a hundred folks that are our customer support managers working with our best and biggest customers around the world, and we have we’re in 35 countries with on the ground capability. I think one of the biggest differentiators for Payoneer, unlike sort of tech startup fintechs that you that are maybe named brands that folks in this room may be familiar with, is we are local and part of the ecosystems where our customers are. We are not writing code in San Francisco and praying somebody in Lahore uses it. We’re at the event on a Thursday afternoon in Pakistan with our customers, helping them onboard. Our team speaks over 20 languages and being in the ecosystem we think is a significant competitive advantage.

So let’s talk about the differences between our customers. We have what we call b to b SMBs and this is a multi trillion dollar opportunity and what we believe will be our biggest growth driver going forward and one that is the core investment thesis for for our our business and one that we think people should stand up and pay attention to. 90% of all cross border payment activity is still happening at traditional banks. And like I’ve said now, fourth time, they don’t have the technology, multi currency account capability, twenty four seven support services that we offer. We have single digit market share in some pretty important global markets and intend to continue to grow that.

Another customer segment are those businesses that sell on marketplaces where we have approximately 20% share. This is not easy to get and super hard to dislodge. We innovated and pioneered this ability to help global sellers who sell on marketplaces, and we feel very comfortable about our position and our ability to continue to operate that business. And we have an enterprise payouts business, as I referred to, enterprises that leverage our payment rails to pay hosts, to pay vendors, to pay suppliers globally. So let’s talk about our ideal customer.

550,000 ICPs, those that are receiving over a 20,000 a year as a minimum amount of accounts receivable represent over 50% of our revenue. I think this is an important distinction and one that folks should understand. We’ve steadily, intentionally been driving our business up market. When when BNI arrived at Payoneer, it was pricing was universal and everyone was welcome. Now we have a much more bespoke pricing machine, a product designed to help SMB grade customers, and a focus on adding and retaining larger and larger businesses.

Less concerned about the absolute count and much more concerned and focused on driving profitable revenue growth as we’ve demonstrated. 2,000,000 overall customers, but not every customer is created equal as I’ve as I’ve described. We define the ICP as a customer who receives at minimum $6,000 of trailing twelve month volume into our business. Those half a million ICPs represent 90% of our total revenue. So the growth of the of the firm is really exciting and our growth is coming from both expanding who we serve, what we sell them, and doing it in an intentional way that we’re adding high value revenue into the firm.

And you can see on these slides that in APAC and Latin America where I described a moment ago, the 20% revenue growth, our take rate is is more than, double what it is, for example, in China. We have tier one countries all across Latin America and APAC where we are seeing strong momentum. Together, Latin America and APAC represent one third of our overall revenues, and we are driving both faster growth in these regions and also product innovation there. 600,000,000 people in Latin America, a billion four in India. We are well positioned to continue to drive solid growth into the future.

What we’ve been doing that I think is important is when when people, I think, who’ve known Payoneer for five years think of us, they generally think of us as an AR company, helping global businesses in the East or businesses in the South get access to the West. We are far more than that. We are as much an AP company as we are an AR company. We’ve consistently been adding more AP products to the financial stack, cross selling those products successfully, and the the, the impact of that is strong logo retention, volume retention, and revenue retention. So they use our AP to pay suppliers, pay international employees, and use our card.

We’ve had over 30% growth in our Payoneer cards business for I I don’t I don’t know if it’s seven quarters or six quarters. I can’t remember off the top of my head. That growth of $5,400,000,000 spent on Payoneer cards in 2024 when you had $80,000,000,000 flowing across the Payoneer platform in 2024 gives you some indication of just how much headroom there is. Usage of multi more than three AP products was 40% in the first quarter of twenty twenty two and greater than 50% in the first quarter of twenty twenty five. The value of the Pay in Your account continues to grow and it’s growing at the same time revenue is growing 40 some odd percent and profitability and margins have expanded.

We’ve been delivering strong revenue per customer expansion over the last couple of years. We’ve been delivering it through a combination of pricing, product mix, customers we attract, and we expect our ARPU to grow faster than our ICP count. That’s intentional. Right? We are because as we drive high value customers and and moderate our cost to serve, that unlocks leverage in our business.

We can we see in front of ourselves significant opportunity to cross sell, upsell, and drive our business toward larger multi entity, multi geography customers who have more complex needs for us to serve. You can see our take rate expansion at a 19, bps at the end of q one. I think this is notable, for folks because we’ve demonstrated a track record of consistently expanding it and what’s somewhat unique when within financial services and payments highlights, I think, our unique position. I think underappreciated largely because when you have a branded relationship with a business, when we can have more and more bespoke pricing, we can capture more revenue and do so with customers who are happy to pay us. In terms of our cash, we’re we have a strong balance sheet.

We generate a lot of cash, and we can invest for growth and return for shareholders. Five hundred million dollars on our balance sheet and no debt. We’ve kept the cash balance stable over the past three years even as we’ve generated significant cash in the business, and we’ve been able to return capital to our shareholders via our repurchase program and we and invest in future growth. We’ve made three acquisitions, all sub hundred million dollars over the last twenty four months. We tuck in acquisition of think of it as an acquihire, a product acquisition, the workforce management, and the license acquisition in China.

Three different flavors of strategy to create value, for our customers and ultimately expand our capability. When we take a step back and think about the value creation of Payoneer, the utility of our business, and the momentum in the firm, we have the opportunity to be the significant financial services partner to the world’s cross border businesses. There isn’t a financial services firm legacy, one of the old ones, fintech, or or one of the stable coin upstarts that are in have the assets, licenses, branded relationships that we do. We are a high growth and profitable business, unlocking real leverage in our business. Now that we’ve passed our twentieth anniversary and are in our third decade, I think there’s a significant moat around our business and significant momentum in our business.

And that’s, I think significant again. There you go. And a multiyear track record of delivering profitable growth. And to to our team, probably the most important dynamic. We’ve communicated and maintain that we will, deliver mid teens revenue growth and 25% adjusted EBITDA margins, in the medium term.

We certainly delivered that in the first quarter of this year. All of 2024, we exceeded that. We are ahead of the plan that we laid out as a management team at our September of twenty twenty three Investor Day, and we feel really great about the results we’ve delivered and the momentum in the firm. So I’ll leave it there. I wanna say thank you to William Blair.

I love coming to this conference. I think you guys put on a great event and, you know, the conversations are meaningful. People are informed. It’s great to see so many people interested in the Payoneer firm, and we’ll be back. If if we’re invited, we’ll definitely be back.

Chris, back to you.

Chris Kennedy, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. No. Thank you for that. Looks like we do have a little bit of time for questions. Feel free to, don’t be shy in the audience.

I guess I’ll just show, ask one. You’ve been meeting with a lot of investors. I mean, what what’s the disconnect in your view? What don’t investors understand? Because you see the financial results, yet Yeah.

John Kaplan, CEO, Payoneer: I I I think I thank you for asking that question because I think it’s an important one. We’re we are a management team that’s delivered more than we promised, and we’ve done that consistently and the opportunity is bigger than what we communicated. And what I would encourage investors to do is roll up your sleeves and do a bit of homework to understand just how gross cross border financial services work. I don’t think investors give us fair credit for our interest revenue. Six plus billion dollars of customer funds that can grow in lockstep with our volume growth that we pay no yield on that is, isn’t pass through revenue the way you think of an ADP or somebody else like that.

It it’s proof of the trust our customers have in our business and the value they see in the account. They’re moving hundreds of millions of dollars from their local bank hold where they may earn interest. Moving into a Payoneer account where they earn none to use our card. And you’re paying these giving us zero multiple on that revenue? That seems like someone needs to sharpen a pencil and do a little homework.

The second, I think folks have been concerned about our business as it relates having gone public via a SPAC and that at the time coming off the pandemic, we’re looking at Amazon and China as a risk. 20% of our revenue is China direct to The United States. Ninety Eight Percent of the strollers sold and the and the carriages sold in The United States are manufactured in China. And I as a parent, I’m excited for antibiotics to be manufactured near here near to home because it’s good for my kids and and my in laws. I think that’s great.

I do think baby strollers are gonna be manufactured not in The United States. And I think the notion that investors think that because of our China exposure, it’s a weakness, they’re missing the narrative. Our China business is a strength. 15% of our revenue is China Entrepreneurs selling to the rest of the world. Those tracks are deep and laid.

The majority of the globe China is the number one trading partner with over a hundred countries around the world. Visa, PayPal, and Payoneer are the foreign companies that have the license that we have. And we’re the we’re the only one of those three that are expressly focused on cross border entrepreneurs and helping them operate. PayPal’s got a great business, but they got a lot of stuff to do. Visa, obviously a great company and a ton to do.

We’re the only one totally focused on cross border SMBs. I think people are missing that. I think another thing people are missing is I think there’s concern because if you look at the financial services industry, you think, take rates go to zero. Well, look at the data. BNI have proven and our team have proven over the last thirty six months that not PayPal Payoneer take rates don’t go to zero, they go up.

And we feel comfortable telling people our take rates are going up because they are. Look at the data. People would say look at our information and say, hey. ICP growth is isn’t as quick as we would like it to be. I think I wouldn’t focus on, what I’ll think of as important but vanity metrics.

What matters is the core underlying dynamics in our firm is our volume is growing in a strong way. Our revenue is growing faster than our volume, and our expenses are growing half the rate of our revenue growth. So expenses growing half the rate of revenue growth, revenue growing faster than volume growth, and a profitable business with $500,000,000 on the balance sheet generating a hundred million plus of free cash flow. I don’t know how many companies are here at this event, which is awesome to see so many people here, but we are one of the best performing in the turnaround of Payoneer from losing $25,000,000 in 2023 and being a 4% revenue growth business to 2024, ’20 percent revenue growth and $14,000,000 of core business EBITDA. There’s a lot of value in this business, and I would encourage people who if you haven’t you know, there’s a lot of people here, so it’s exciting for us to see so many new faces around our business.

I would encourage you to engage with our our our IR team, learn the business cause we share a lot and it’s important. And once you get into it, you see just how much moat and leverage there is in our business.

Chris Kennedy, Research Analyst, William Blair: Great. Well, with that, we’re gonna have to leave it there. We do have a breakout session after this.

John Kaplan, CEO, Payoneer: Thank Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody. It’s great to see so many new faces.

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