Fintech company Payoneer recently announced plans to go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company FTAC Olympus Acquisition (FTOC). However, since a cornerstone of Payoneer's business is cross-border transactions, it hasn't exactly been immune to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on March 1, Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel had the opportunity to ask Payoneer CEO Scott Galit about the company's business and how it's been impacted.
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Matt Frankel: We talked about Payoneer on the show a few weeks ago when you first announced that you're going public. But for those who aren't really familiar with your business, Payoneer is mostly known for its cross-border services. Can you give us a brief overview of what Payoneer does in the fintech space?
Scott Galit: Sure. The basics of it are really that when you think about how technology is really changing, how all of us engage in commerce, what we see is that it's actually making it so businesses all over the world, in a digital world, have all kinds of new opportunities and all kinds of new challenges. What Payoneer has built as a global financial platform that really focuses on providing services to make it possible for any business of any size, from the biggest Silicon Valley tech company all the way through the smallest, small business owner in emerging markets to build and grow their digital business and we provide them with cross-border payments, Matt, as you said, we provide them with working capital, we provide them with all kinds of services to actually make it easier for them to build and grow and manage their businesses. That's what we do, is really we empower any business of any size to build and grow their digital business in our global digital world.
Frankel: When we heard the latest results from Mastercard (MA 0.07%) and Visa (V -0.23%) a couple of weeks ago, I saw the weakest part of their report by far was cross-border payments. International travel is just not a thing right now. So how has COVID impacted your business being that that's one of your big focus areas?
Galit: Yes. It's a great question and I think you actually really highlighted it. I think if you go back and look at Visa and MasterCard as well, I think they'll talk about this. That there's actually an important difference between cross-border payments related to travel and cross-border payments related to digital commerce. Actually, what they have reported is significant growth in cross-border e-commerce activity, which hasn't grown fast enough to offset how big their business was around travel and cross-border. For us, we're actually the opposite. The vast majority of our business related to cross-border is with people and businesses that aren't traveling. They're operating where they operate and they're doing business with partners and customers around the world. We've seen that actually accelerating. We've had a part of our business that actually did relate to travel and that part has suffered a little bit along with some of those other companies, like you mentioned, Visa and MasterCard, where travel has been hit. But we've really seen an acceleration of digital commerce trends around cross-border and we think that's really a permanent shift in how the business world is working.
