Report: Payoneer Could Go Public By Merging With SPAC

Digital payments company Payoneer is in talks to go public via a business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp., Bloomberg reported.

The blank-check company has started discussions to bring in new investment to help with a deal that could value the merged firm at over $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed source.

Conditions could become modified or discussions might not lead to a deal since an arrangement is not set in stone, Bloomberg reported.

FTAC raised approximately $755 million in an initial public offering (IPO) in August. It is headed up by Betsy Cohen, its chairman, and Ryan Gilbert, its CEO.

Payoneer is supported by investors such as Viola Ventures, Ping An, Greylock Partners, TCV and Wellington Management Co. The company, which works in over 200 nations and territories, was begun by Yuval Tal in Israel and is currently headed up by CEO Scott Galit. It offers services such as international payments for clients like Google and Airbnb.

The small- to medium-sized business (SMB) ecosystem’s clip of digitization has been very quick — so much so that it disguises the fact that digital transformation has, in fact, been occurring for years.

Iain McNicoll, Payoneer’s vice president for SMBs in the Americas, told PYMNTS in September that small companies started eyeing the digital ecosystem over 10 years ago in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.

However, now, the cadence of innovation is so quick that SMBs need financial help to keep up — and McNicoll said FinTech firms and legacy banks can offer that by collaborating in lieu of competing.

“The stat that we’ve seen around a lot … recently is that the percentage of retail transactions that are being done online has grown as much during the pandemic as it had in the prior 10 years,” he said. “So clearly, the trend is growing — and SMBs are all understanding it’s time to grow with it.”