Payoneer On Global Connectivity And Empowerment

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the future and what their ideal payments system looks like.

Here’s what Scott Galit, CEO and Director at Payoneer Inc., had to say.

Biggest Trends

Overall, Galit thinks 2015 has been about global connectivity and empowerment.

“There’s some incredible things that are changing how the world works,” he says. “What we see is this wave of technology, a wave of connectivity creating new opportunities for a wider range of professionals and small businesses from all over the world to participate in the global economy that weren’t possible before.”

Preparing for 2016 and Beyond

Looking at Payoneer specifically, Galit says, “We’re rapidly expanding our tools to localize cross-border business trade for buyers and sellers, both parties.” He continues, “If you’re selling into the United States, we’ll give you a U.S. bank account you can actually invoice with. So you have a presence that feels more global, your customers can buy locally — they’re making an international payment but they don’t know it, they are paying locally in their local currency.” In summation he adds, “We deal with all the complexity. We’ve launched that in the U.S., in Europe, the U.K. and have Japan coming on soon.

Overall, Galit says “We have been very global and now we’re getting much more local in many more places around the world — that’s an important next step for us.” Payoneer, says Galit “ [is] working really closely with these local merchants and helping them understand how to grow their businesses. We’ve been making significant investments in countries around the world and building out a presence in India. In the next few months we’ll really build out that local presence.”

This trend of taking their global business local means they’ll be able to better service their customers, Galit said. “We have customers in all those markets, but now we’ll actually be much closer to them.”

Ideal Payments Solution

Focusing on financial inclusion and Payoneer’s efforts there, Galit states, “For us the tagline for the business is ‘empowering local commerce.’ We take our role in actually helping to educate, inform and connect businesses and entrepreneurs all over the world into this new realm of opportunity — we take that very seriously.” He continues, “We’ve made over a million dollars of investment to actually put on events and bring speakers in, have relevant content to understand how you can grow a marketing business and a commerce business.”

He goes on to note a study that Payoneer recently conducted to address the issue of inclusion head on. “We put together a benchmarking guide with over 23,000 freelancers from all over the world participate to benchmark their income. We have people all over the world spread by gender, by education, by age, type of service they provide, by country.” He goes on to explain just how valuable a tool this is for local business owners, “So now you can actually reference, in your own language, information about how do I compare against someone in another country, someone with less education, a woman against a man. It’s been really powerful.”