Bea Ordonez, CFO of Payoneer, a leading financial technology company, joins Jack McCullough to discuss the exciting opportunities and challenges of driving Payoneer growth in today’s dynamic global economy. Bea shares her insights on building a high-performing culture, fostering innovation and navigating volatility in the fintech landscape. She also discusses the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and offers advice for the next generation of finance leaders. Tune in to hear Bea’s inspiring story and learn how Payoneer is empowering businesses around the world.
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Driving Growth In a Changing World With CFO Bea Ordonez
We have a fantastic guest. Bea Ordonez is the CFO of Payoneer. Payoneer is a global financial technology company that provides online money transfer and digital payment services, enabling businesses and professionals to send and receive funds across borders quickly and securely. Bea, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
I got your summary of the company probably from your website or somewhere like that, but I’m sure you can do a much better job of describing Payoneer than I did. Probably a lot of our readers are familiar, but for those who might not be or aren’t quite as familiar as they maybe need to be, can you share a little about what you are doing these days?
Payoneer is, importantly, a mission-driven financial platform, and I will come back to the mission in a little moment. As you noted in your introduction, we are connecting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and entrepreneurs, especially in emerging markets. We cover a very diverse and broad geographical footprint to what we like to think of as a rising and frankly increasingly global and increasingly digital economy.
When I talk about a mission, and when we talk about our mission, it’s based on our view that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. One of the ways in which opportunity is not equally distributed is in access to the financial system. We read about it here, even in the U.S., with unbanked folks and so on, but on a global scale, access to the financial system is not equally distributed.
For small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs globally, the ability to do straightforward things critical to their business—to pay, to get paid and to manage their global operations—is both critical and complex. We all see that global commerce has become ever more digital. We see that with the rise of global marketplaces, whether it’s all the names we know and love, like Amazon, Etsy and eBay, or less well-known global marketplaces like Mercado Libre or Shopee. We see those marketplaces rising. We see them aggregating both supply and demand, and we see even the globalization of labor.
We know that the pandemic accelerated those trends, and while all of that commerce, all of that ability to trade across borders has become easier, in many ways, the process of sending and receiving payments globally is still incredibly complicated.
At Payoneer, what we do very simply is look to solve that complexity with a purpose-built financial stack designed to meet the needs of SMBs and entrepreneurs, and make it easier for them to operate on a global scale. We do it at scale. You noted in your introduction that we are relatively well-known in the U.S. We are not all that well-known in the markets we serve and have customers and critical mass, but we are quite well-known.
We operate at real scale. We have roughly two million customers. We’ll move roughly $70 billion of GMV (gross market value) through our ecosystem and allow trade across roughly 7,000 trade corridors. In the simplest of terms, we are looking to give those SMBs in emerging markets, on a global scale, a real on-ramp to the digital economy and a fundamental way of powering their business and operating globally and at scale.
I didn’t think of it as a mission-centric organization, but it’s great when a for-profit company can offer a great service and improve the world in the process, or at least its sector. Kudos to you for taking that approach. We’ll return to Payoneer in a little bit, but I want to get into your background. You grew up somewhere in East Texas. My guess is the Dallas area. Am I right on that?
I get guesses that cover the globe. Australian is probably the top guess. I’m not Australian. South African is also a guess. I’m also not South African. My background is, that I was born in England, in London, specifically to Spanish parents, and left in my twenties. I spent time in Bermuda, Florida and New York, where I have made my home, married a Canadian and worked in a global company. I am a giant melting pot of every accent imaginable.
For those who might think I was serious, no, I did not think Bea was from Texas. That was the one place I felt I could safely rule out. It’s interesting. When you think of your childhood, was it in the London area? Did you stay there until college?
I did. I grew up in London. I grew up in Tottenham, which, if you have soccer fans reading the blog, is a well-known team. It’s a part of London. I was the child of immigrant parents. As I said, my parents are Spanish. They moved to England in the sixties and I had a pretty regular public school, rough-and-tumble London existence right through 18 when I left for college.
Did you study business as an undergrad?
I studied law. I attended a university in England. I studied law in a lot of ways. I’m a frustrated barrister. I certainly watched lots of courtroom dramas growing up. I have always been fascinated by it, and it’s a discipline that has served me well in my chosen field in terms of the real intersection between financial services, regulated financial services and fintech. That discipline and that regulatory background have been helpful, but the law was always fascinating to me.
It’s interesting because I also think like the best lawyers, in addition to the things you mentioned, they are also good at solving problems. I’m guessing that’s probably something, I don’t know if it comes naturally to you, but it’s something you are probably good at at this point in your career.
That’s a critical skill in almost any role in the C-suite. Looking to solve problems through innovation, through a different mindset and being open to exploring different ways of tackling a particular problem. I spent quite an extended part of my career in a much more operational role as COO of trading companies and capital markets companies, and I found that fascinating because it was the intersection between financial technology, customer experience and the ability to do complex things to accomplish complex transactions in a compliant and regulatory compliant way. It’s almost like a puzzle to solve for the right balance between customer experience and risk and regulatory compliance.
You’ve had one of the more interesting careers of people I have met. You started, perhaps fairly conventionally after undergrad, you went to Anderson Tax and then PWC, but for most of the last 25 years, you’ve had an interesting suite of executive roles. Many people go to public accounting, controller, CFO, and you didn’t have that kind of path. From your background, you’ve had three different types of C-Suite roles, but what were some of the things you learned along the way that helped you prepare to be the CFO of Payoneer?
That broad experience has positioned me to love what I do and to hopefully excel at what I do. The role of the CFO has certainly evolved. It has become, yes, an accounting and finance role, but a much broader strategic role and a real in-depth understanding of what makes the business work operationally and what makes the business work from a data perspective. What are the data insights that you can glean? How can you look at data as a strategic asset within the organization? What are the levers of the business that can ignite and drive growth, and how should you think about that strategically?
As you noted, I have had perhaps a less conventional path to CFO. I was a CFO at 26 in a relatively small company, a startup, which was a fascinating experience on a bunch of levels. I transitioned into a broader operational role at that point and learned how to run and how to interface, frankly, with technology teams to solution-design and drive outcomes that were going to ignite growth, unlock leverage in the company, open up new markets and potentially launch new business lines and products. I have touched each of those elements, and it’s the area of the business that’s been the most fascinating for me.
Along the way, very few people I have spoken to achieve the success that you’ve had without maybe some mentors that they have met along the way. When you look back, are there any important people that helped you achieve what you’ve achieved in your career?
There are always important people at all levels, whether it’s official mentors or CEOs that we have all been fortunate enough to work with along the way. They can be very different and very unique characters in many important ways. I have always tried to cast a pretty wide net in any organization I have worked in to try and find—I like to call them the hidden gems in the organization. Maybe they think a little bit differently, have a perspective that is differentiating in some way. Intellectual curiosity is super important.
I would say the most formative experience in my career was that startup organization because I worked for a great boss who taught me a lot about critical thinking and how to, he used to call it, “peel the onion,” how to look at a problem and dig in and ask questions and get as good an understanding as you could in the moment.
Working for a startup, particularly the startup I worked at, we were launching a product that provided electronic and algorithmic access into equities markets globally, and now you have that in the palm of your hand. You can go to any number of apps and buy a stock on the Japanese exchange in two clicks. It’s extraordinary, but several years ago, give or take, when I joined the company—it was called G-Trade when we were starting—that was very nascent.
The idea of electronic, real-time access to those equity markets was super nascent, and working in that environment where there wasn’t a defined roadmap, a defined answer for how to do the things that we were trying to do taught me 1) a ton of resilience and 2) confidence in [my] decision-making ability, even {when I] didn’t have perfect data or someone who [could] tell me that it’s the right way to go. Those things are hard to come by and critical to driving change and having an innovation-first mindset.
You’ve worked in the industry for several years, and I don’t know too many industries in the last several years that haven’t changed very much, but you’ve worked in one that’s changed quite a bit. What are some of the big changes in your industry that you’ve observed? I know you probably don’t have a crystal ball on your desk, but perhaps you do, I don’t know. Where do you see the industry going in the years ahead?
It’s such a great question. The pace of innovation in this global environment is astonishing. I have worked for a long time at the intersection of what I will call traditional regulated financial services and technology companies, and it’s a fascinating intersection, and we increasingly see it as consumers. Companies are consumers, we are all consumers, but you increasingly see in that ecosystem that different parts of that value chain that create the customer experience are enabled by different entities in that broader landscape.
Tech companies, fintech companies and more traditional financial players are working and collaborating to deliver that integrated experience to the customer. That’s a big shift—the idea that a marketplace works with lenders who enable one part of the value chain, payment providers who enable another, banks or credit card companies who enable yet another and so on.
The ability to unlock a frictionless customer experience with all of those elements of that customer experience has been fascinating, and it’s a trend that we continue to see in the market. That only accelerates. The pandemic drove additional or an uptick in digital adoption and an uptick in eCommerce more generally, and we have the digital-first generation coming of age.
I have two kids. They don’t know of an age that doesn’t involve something that’s more powerful than any computer we had several years ago, [and] in the palm of their hands. All of those trends, including digital adoption more globally in emerging markets, are going to accelerate the pace of that and continue to digitize the process of exchanging value to keep up with those innovations from a marketplace perspective, and Payoneer sits in that ecosystem looking to unlock that real value for customers.
I want to bring back Payoneer, and perhaps it’s an obvious question, but I will ask it. What attracted you to the role? How’d that come about that you became the CFO? Your immediate job before, if I’m not mistaken, you were the Chief Innovation Officer at Webster Bank. I’m sure that’s great training, but I’d love to hear that story.
I had an interesting and maybe unconventional journey along the way, and my time at Webster was fascinating, sitting at that intersection between innovation and traditional financial services at a time when banks in the US were wrestling with a rapidly changing environment. Regulators are wrestling with a rapidly changing environment in terms of consumer preferences, digitization, blockchain, crypto, and these novel assets.
It was a fascinating time as I got to speak to the folks here at Payoneer, including our CEO John Caplan. I learned that wasn’t familiar with the company coming into it. It’s a fascinating company because, as we have discussed, the mission is very much at the center of what drives the Payoneer ethos. It’s not very well known, as I noted in the US, but it has a real scale and footprint and is solving a genuine need for small businesses at scale and it’s super global.
As I think of years in my career, where I have enjoyed roles and where I have enjoyed company cultures, it’s when they are truly global, and we have boots on the ground in somewhere close to 30 countries. On an average day, I could be talking to colleagues in China, India, London, and New York. It’s been fascinating, and then ultimately for me, as it is for most people, as we get to this point in our careers, it’s about the people that you work with and the mission again. The vision of the management team and the leadership resonated for me.
You mentioned the leadership and your CEO, John Caplan. I’m always curious to explore that relationship, and he’s only been in the role for several years.
He’s been in the role a little more than two years. I have been in the role for about a year and a half. We have certainly been a company transforming our business to capture the very real opportunity as we see it in the B2B space for SMBs doing business globally across emerging markets. He’s a fantastic CEO. I have been fortunate to work for great CEOs throughout my career, and I have always taken the same approach, which is complete transparency and complete honesty. We don’t always agree, and that’s okay. We can have a relationship built on trust and complete candor, and then we move forward.
That goes for all of us within the management and leadership teams here at Payoneer. As I have said often to CEOs throughout my career, it’s not my job to [say] yes to you. It’s our job, all of us, to challenge each other and to have diversity of opinions in the room. Only then will we get, in my opinion, the best outcome for the business. It’s a relationship of trust, assuming the best of intentions and moving forward to get the best outcome that we can for our customers, first and foremost; for our people; and then ultimately for the company.
That’s a great and healthy philosophy. If you’re a sports fan, when a team moves to a different city, it takes me about ten years to acknowledge it. Like the Indianapolis Colts for the Baltimore Colts in my childhood. Every once in a while, I still call them the Baltimore Colts. It’s only been since 1979. I want to understand your philosophy on building a team. The big thing is, when we spoke before, the phrase that came up was the high-performing culture. How do you create a high-performing culture, perhaps not only within finance and accounting but across the entire enterprise?
First and foremost, you have to measure, and that’s hard. There are a million business management books on everything from OKRs to balanced scorecards to any number of metrics, but first and foremost, you have to measure and align around what it is you think you should measure, which in and of itself is a hard question. Align around how you are going to measure that throughout the organization and how that waterfalls and drives that vision and that strategic focus across the organization.
In a big global company with disparate folks sitting in, as I have said, numerous locations, that’s incredibly challenging. Measuring it is as critical as celebrating success. That’s a part of it, but equally, and almost as important, all companies are relatively good at celebrating success. Acknowledging mistakes and failures is important. Not in a finger-pointing, blame-allotting way, but in a “we took a data-driven approach to this particular challenge, or we took this approach to solving this problem, expecting outcome A, and we got outcome B, let’s think about what series of decisions got us there.”
That’s something that we have worked on developing here. It’s a culture of experimentation. It’s been super impactful to understand how the thing that you do impacts the customer experience, the customer’s behavior and the value that you are unlocking for them, to measure that and to take data from that and drive it back into the process. It’s taking that data-driven approach to decision-making that is so critical, and then [doing so] that it doesn’t sound so robotic.
The key other element that’s missing in everything I said is empathy. You build a high-performing team by being authentic. I’m a big believer, I used to call it my Popeye theory. I am what I am. I’m a big believer that everybody in the company needs to be who they are. We all need to be rowing in the same direction, but leading with empathy and understanding, allowing people to be their authentic selves—with everything that means—and driving that culture of, frankly, trust and collaboration. It’s a balance. You have to be super objective in what you are measuring, and you have to be, in my view, an empathetic leader who walks a mile in your team’s shoes as much as you possibly can.
Popeye culture. You won me to your side right there, but now I’m having trouble not picturing you with that sailor hat.
I won’t try to do the accent, and I don’t smoke a pipe.
It’d be a great look for both of us. I also know it’s a passion of yours, and so I’m curious, how do you leverage your position as a CFO and, as a leader generally, to empower and support other women in the workplace?
There are so many changes to the good for several years. I started from a C-suite perspective in the capital markets space in trading companies. It was pretty common or frequent for me to be the only woman in the room, and that was the case for years. We have two women leading the largest stock exchanges in the U.S., the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange. That’s astonishing in a lot of ways. It would have been almost unthinkable in some of the trading rooms that I saw in my late 20s and 30s, but [there is] still a long way to go. We all see the data: board representation has improved and C-suite representation has improved.
The pandemic lowered labor participation rates for women meaningfully. We still have a long way to go from an income parity perspective. It’s still important for us to be thinking along those lines. A few things we should all think about [in] supporting women and others in the workplace: It’s providing visible role models for them. That’s important. It’s something that I would have loved to have had as I came up in my career, someone who looked a bit or sounded a bit like me in the C-suite as a role model.
It’s also providing practical support, which means family leave and benefits and flexible working environments. Giving lip service to noble intentions is a wonderful thing, and it’s certainly a start, but providing practical support for people to meaningfully participate in the labor market is better still. It’s certainly also mentorship, and you talked a little bit about mentorship, and on a more broad level, it’s celebrating the diversity that exists in companies like ours and in general. All of those things are super important.
My niece, her dad is from the Dominican Republic, so she looks a lot more like her dad than she looks like my sister, and she’s got his last name. The world sees her as a Latina, and she’s entering college. She’s going to be a freshman, but she used the expression on me, “If I can see it, I can be it.” Somehow I managed to live decades without hearing that expression.
For her, seeing these role models is critical. If she’d grown up with me, and her interest, she’s very passionate about robotics, there would have been somewhere approximately zero female role models, particularly female Latinas, to look up to, but now she’s got plenty. She’s funny because she was 16, and she was coaching a group of 13 and 14-year-old girls in robotics. She is my niece, but she posted that she loves mentoring the next generation. I’m like, “You are sixteen, what are you talking about, lady?”
That’s great. As you think about women in the fields of engineering, computer science, data, and AI there are not enough visible role models. It’s amazing that a sixteen-year-old is already taking it upon herself to provide that visibility to younger girls coming up through the education system. I’m all for it.
I know a lot of CFOs, and there’s one thing that CFOs hate, and it’s the inability to see the future and deal with volatility. They like a nice, predictable environment. But you are in tech. It’s not what you signed up for, but how do you execute in this environment, dealing with stability and dealing with what seems to be a constant state of unpredictability? Yet you are responsible as a leader in your company for planning sustainable growth. What’s that all about? What’s that like?
It’s so true. The fintech landscape, particularly since 2021 and arguably for longer, has been super volatile: macro uncertainty, inflationary pressures, rising interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty. As a company at the nexus of global trade, we think about those things a lot and how we can best build a resilient business.
In many ways, diversity is a natural resilience driver within our business more broadly, but you have to build resilience within your teams. You have to acknowledge that you can’t see around corners and work with the best data you have at your disposal. It comes down to the data that can help you make the best possible decision-making, understanding that you don’t know what’s around those corners.
As Mike Tyson famously said, and I hear this quote a lot, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” You’ve got to be able to pivot and to look at your business model and satisfy yourself that you can grow through different cycles, that you can unlock leverage through different operating environments, that you have enough vectors of growth over enough timelines and different time horizons to think about your investment priorities and adapt accordingly and build again that resilient business model.
You are not going to believe this, but the Tyson quote that you gave, that’s my favorite business quote. I created a series of infographics, and one of them was exactly that. I reached out to Mike Tyson’s people asking if I could use an image of him in it, and they said, “Sure, for $500,000.” I’m like, “Okay.” That’s a little outside the world, but that’s my favorite. My second favorite is the woman who flew around the world, Amelia Earhart. She said, “The best way to do it is to do it,” which I’m pretty sure Nike plagiarized from her years later, but I love those quotes. I love that you are quoting Tyson. Back to the growth. Any milestones you can chat about at Payoneer?
Our strategy for growth is anchored in being customer-centric. We talked a little about the real problems we solve for SMBs and entrepreneurs who are underserved by the legacy financial system. We believe in focusing on solving those problems. We are where our customers are. That’s why we have so many boots on the ground in so many countries. We work hard to understand those problems and to drive solutions, and we recognize that if you are in the financial services business, as banks know only too well, you are in the business of trust. That means that customers look for certainty of execution, which means that they need to have a high degree of trust in you as a financial institution.
We focus again on that customer-centricity to drive growth, and we are excited about the opportunity to continue to penetrate that B2B space for small businesses looking to unlock growth by accessing demand in other markets. We generated 21% top-line growth in Q2, also in Q1. We are excited about the momentum we have in our business, and we are staying focused on solving for customers. That, to me, is the key.
I apologize in advance for this question, but I’m legally obligated to ask you if I want to remain a host for CFOs. How do you see Gen AI and some other technologies like data analytics impacting your organization, now going forward?
A few years ago, the question was blockchain. Nobody asks about blockchain anymore, and it continues to be an interesting space. On AI, it’s exciting. We have talked a little bit about it already. It starts with data, and organizations that are going to excel in the next curve of our innovation are those that are able to unlock data as a strategic asset within their organization. It’s hard because most financial services organizations have disparate data, have developed that data over a long period and have systems that don’t always talk to each other effectively.
CFOs sit in a powerful position to be able to champion the notion of data as a strategic asset and to drive investment to that. To unlock insights, to drive engagement in their customer-facing engines, to drive stickiness and greater adoption to engage tche customer. That’s what we see in a lot of these trends with social media platforms and the rise of eommerce within those, with super apps, with the gamification of retail investment, for example.
It all starts with data as a foundational asset, and AI on top of that. Machine learning is fascinating. The governance, I have to go back to my discipline as a lawyer. Governance is going to be key for financial services organizations and in general, there are data privacy elements that need to be thought through. There are governance and other risk and resiliency elements, but we think it’s a super exciting area that we are exploring in our customer journey. How do we automate and streamline our interactions with customers with predictive modeling that can help us grow our business? In compliance and risk monitoring, machine learning models will help financial institutions better solve risk and transaction monitoring within their businesses. A super exciting area for us all to watch for.
The technology is fascinating, but the CFO role has been changing considerably. The tagline to this show is, “CFOs no longer report history, they make history,” but what do you think the future of financial leadership is going to be like?
I love that tagline. The evolution of the CFO’s role will continue. The CFO needs to be a strong strategic partner to the business. It needs to be leading and advocating for innovation within its organization. Gone are the days that CFOs are sitting in their rooms looking only at the financial reporting. Historically, they need to be focusing on the business with an innovation mindset and helping the business make decisions to unlock growth. It’s an exciting place to be for CFOs, and we are going to see the pace of innovation only accelerate from here on out.
One of the things I wanted to do with this show is change the perception of CFOs to the world. I like to ask people, is there a fun fact or do you have an interesting hobby or is there, even if you like, have a favorite joke, is there something about you that sticks out a little bit? Your background is quite interesting itself, but maybe something a little different than that.
I am not a joke teller, so I won’t impose that on your readers. Fun fact, I have a brown belt in Judo. I haven’t done that in a long time, but folks are often surprised that I did competitive judo for a long time in my younger days. As for a hobby, I like going to basketball games. I was adopted, in New York City, my adopted home. We love going to see the Brooklyn Nets, who had a less stellar season, but we are hoping for a better season, and it’s been an enjoyable thing to do with my ten-year-old.
I bet. The Nets, not the Knicks?
Not the Knicks. No. We live in Manhattan, but the Brooklyn Nets captured our hearts, so we are diehard Nets fans.
It is funny how that can happen. I know people in LA root for the Clippers, even though they have had the Lakers dynasty their entire life, but they are the Clippers, and that’s that. I live in Boston. It looks like a good young team here. I don’t know if we are going to win any more championships, but it looks like we’ll be competitive for the next few years if nothing else. Always fun. You are a very busy individual, CFO of a growing company, and work-life balance is always an issue for executives, but more broadly, how do you achieve work-life balance because it ain’t easy?
It isn’t. As for work-life balance, again, if you are providing a supportive environment for your team, leading with empathy and leading with understanding walking a mile in folks’ shoes, then you can allow people to have the work-life balance that they are hoping to get and be supportive through that.
I always like to conclude these episodes with, what’s your advice for the next generation of CFOs? How should they be thinking about their careers? What are the skills they should be developing? Whatever it is that you think that maybe your 30-year-old version of yourself, although you’d already had a CFO job at that point in time, ought to be thinking of.
In common with other folks who have been on your show, intellectual curiosity is key. Not just for CFOs, but in general. Keep learning. Cast a wide net. You can learn a lot from people who are sometimes buried in all sorts of strange parts of your organization, and in general, to understand an area that you didn’t understand before, get a deep operational understanding of your business.
One of the reasons that I have been able to progress in my career is taking the time to understand elements of the business that can seem mundane and routine but are the machinery that drives the car. Then, finally, to take on more. I never said no to anything along the way in terms of new responsibilities or new things to do. I always took on more if there was an opportunity, even if there wasn’t a clear path to what it would mean to me.
I almost always said yes. You can take risks particularly early in your career. It’s not a universal truth, but women perhaps tend to be a little more risk averse around career moves than men, but in general, you can afford to be much more risk-on with your career earlier on, before you have all the financial responsibilities that you have as you get older, and you’ll benefit from that diversity of opportunity. From pushing yourself potentially outside of your comfort zone and into industries that may be interesting to you but aren’t where you’ve honed your skills. A broad approach and being a little more risk-on in how you think about the world will serve you.
This has been wonderful. You’ve got a lot going on, so I certainly appreciate you taking the time to chat with me and to share your wisdom and experience with our readers. With that said, I’d like to give you the final word.
It’s been an absolute pleasure. I have enjoyed reading your show and look forward to many more, and I hope it was useful for your readers.
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That wraps up this episode. A huge thank you to our sponsors Planful and The CFO Leadership Council for their amazing support. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and visit us on our page. Until next time, rock on.
