A town banker in tomorrow's global village

Scott Galit, Chief Executive Officer of Payoneer Inc., believes the strict regulations imposed on the banking industry have provided an opportunity to capture market share in the global payment processing space. "There is this huge unaddressed inefficiency around how payments move around the world," Galit said. "What we believe we do is really optimizing the cross-border trade aspect for a business in a way that a bank in a given country really wouldn't have a prayer of doing. That is where we think we have a unique value and a sustainable competitive advantage on a global basis."

Galit, previously an investment banker, knows how challenging innovation can be. "It's really easy to see how if you are a really innovative person that it's incredibly stifling to stick it out in a bank environment and how if you are sitting in the compliance and risk groups where you are getting beaten up by regulators how hard it is to embrace innovation on any kind of mass scale," he said. "It's just really, really hard to do and there have been a lot pressures so banks have just gotten very process driven, very conservative, very risk adverse and very slow."

Technology to push the envelope

Payoneer, founded in 2005, is a business-to-business (B2B) global financial services company that provides cross-border, online money transfers and e-commerce payment services in over 200 countries. Galit forecasts the overall market opportunity for B2B global payments to be $50 billion in the next five years with a 250 percent growth rate over the next decade. The company's list of high-profile clients includes such names as Airbnb, Google, Amazon and MasterCard.

Payoneer believes its competitive secret has always been its ability to use cutting-edge technology to push the envelope. "A single API connection to our platform gives customers the ability with a unique token to send a payment anywhere in the world," Galit said. Customers pay for transactions, and the funds arrive the same day using a Payoneer MasterCard credit card, a wire transfer to a local bank, e-wallet or an international check, he noted, adding that he believes it is not just the technology that is important but also the customer experience.

"What we do is so much more about the value that gets built, controlling the user experience and delivering all kind of additional value that really shrinks the world in a way that just moving the money can't do," Galit said.

Beginning of the digital revolution

Payoneer is a certified Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) level 1 holder with bleeding edge security technology designed to ensure all transactions are safe and secure for its customers. "Our customers don't put their money at risk by working with us," Galit said. "We do all kinds of things for compliance security, whether that be the IPG locations and the PC fingerprints, and we've got a neural network that maps across every connection on our platform. We have integrations with all kinds of third-party databases; we have a state of the art RSA integration that we are leveraging across online and mobile infrastructure."

Looking ahead to the future, Galit said, the "more and more digital the world becomes the more and more embedded payments are able to become." This can provide an app experience in which the consumer doesn't even need to think about the payment, he added.

"We are in a really unique position to continue to lead the way towards more seamless, embedded, context driven and frictionless global payments in the B2B realm in the way that credit cards have kind of been the anchor in the B2C realm," he said. "We are super excited and think it's a permanent shift in the way the world works playing out in a period of decades on a huge scale on a global basis."

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