Payoneer Eyes ‘Growing Universe’ Of Connected Opportunities After $3B SPAC Listing

It’s official: Payoneer is now a publicly traded company.

Having completed its special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp. and now embarking on its new life as Payoneer Global Inc., the company began trading on the Nasdaq Monday (June 28).

Talking to Karen Webster shortly before the listing, CEO Scott Galit said Payoneer had been contemplating an initial public offering (IPO) since before the pandemic, but the last year had served as an undeniable “inflection point” given the rapid worldwide acceleration of digital commerce, while also serving as the final push needed to “lean in and start actually moving toward the public markets.”

That combination of factors presented an incredible opportunity that Payoneer would be best positioned to capture as a public firm, he said.

“Part of why we’re so excited to be public is having more resources and more tools to actually do more for our customers more quickly than we could have before,” Galit said.

The New Universe of Opportunity

Payoneer got its start in marketplace commerce but has expanded from there as the businesses it serves have, themselves, sought to grow beyond their initial entry point. As marketplaces have become more popular and crowded over time, sellers have had to level up their abilities as marketers, which has made their ambitions broader, he said.

“And as they develop those sophisticated capabilities in marketing to stay competitive, they ask themselves, ‘Why does this need to be limited to Amazon?’” he said. “So, they’ll actually look to leverage those skills to acquire customers directly outside of the marketplace as a point of entry into broader relationships.”

The new omnichannel isn’t so much about selling both online and offline as it is about selling across a variety of online channels as a means of directly engaging with a larger base of consumers, Galit said. The next step is serving those consumers more robustly and seamlessly. One of the most powerful and important things digitization and connection does is eliminate frictions. Once one has a commerce platform up and running, firms have a natural jump-off point for adding more friction-busting value to it.

Travel platforms offer a key example of this, he said. Once a customer has booked a trip, it is safe to assume they are going to want to do things while they are on the road, giving the travel platform an opportunity to help tourists find and book those activities. Having already hooked that customer, the platform has a great opportunity to expand upon that existing relationship.

“We see this universe of opportunities out there,” he said. “We see so many people with so much potential in so many places around the world, but there really are challenges, and there really is friction. And we want to be their best partner, basically the go-to partner for digital commerce everywhere, helping anyone anywhere really achieve their potential and take advantage of this new universe of opportunities in the world.”

Just Getting Started

For all the change and connectedness we have seen in the markets in the last year and a half, Galit noted, the connected economy is still far away from reaching anything that looks like maturity, and the opportunities to grow and shape this evolving space are still abundant.

Payoneer is just getting started in the public market, he said, a reinvention well timed to coincide with a global economy that is currently reinventing itself around connectedness — and will be for some time to come.

“We’re really early on,” he said. “We look forward to just continuing to widen the top of the funnel of activity and opportunity. And as we do that, we really believe that there are so many ways that we can help customers and also generate value for investors.”