Now, and first of all, thank you, everyone, again for joining us on day two of the Wolfe FinTech Forum. Really happy to have John, the CEO of Payoneer, with us, which I was just mentioning to John. I mean, it was an amazing year last year. I think there were more investors recognizing what the story has and how differentiated the company actually is in terms of really just cross-border payments, business payments, and really enabling companies to have systems that are much more efficient for themselves. I still think there's an enormous runway of awareness out there for room for investors to really know what you have to offer. You know, with that said, I mean, maybe just take a step back.
This is also, you know, for here, for those here and those on the webcast, just give us a sense of what is Payoneer doing that's differentiated. What do you guys, you know, maybe remind us of the business mix. I'd love to hear a little bit more also in terms of what drove such a strong year last year. What was your success last year? Your stock did well last year. Obviously, the market's overall correcting now, but growth really accelerated on a core basis last year quite a bit too. If we could just start with a recap of the business and last year as well.
First of all, it's great to be here and excited to talk about the business we're building and the opportunity in front of us. We are solving a really important point of pain for global cross-border entrepreneurs and SMBs. Businesses that operate cross-border that have entities in multiple geographies need a full financial stack to manage 100% of their accounts receivable and 100% of their accounts payable.
Yep.
We are perfectly positioned to provide that for them. We have the license infrastructure. We do business in 190 countries. We have the relationships with the world's largest marketplaces, as you know. We have a fast-growing and dynamic B2B business, which is really powering our growth. We have the brand and the awareness. We sit at the foremost interesting intersections in payments, we think, B2B, cross-border, SMB, and emerging markets. In the markets where over 50% of the GDP is cross-border, where it is powered by SMBs, Payoneer is the provider of choice. Your about our success in 2024 was no accident. We actually laid out and articulated in September of 2023 a very clear strategy to build the full financial stack for global cross-border SMBs, and we are well on the way to deliver that.
As you said, 2024, a record year, $80 billion of volume flowing on the Payoneer Platform, $721 million of core revenue, up 20%. The year before that, 5% revenue growth.
Right.
We had a powerful growth year driven by the success of our sellers that sell on marketplaces and over 40% growth in our B2B business. Most importantly, and this is important for folks listening or here in the room, we drove core business profitability. We went from 2023, the core business net of interest losing $25 million to 2024, $14 million of core business adjusted EBITDA. We had powerful revenue growth and exciting leverage unlock in the business. As we've guided to 2025, we're going to 3x that core business adjusted EBITDA to north of $40 million. What's working at Payoneer? A lot, actually. You know, our sellers that sell on marketplaces are seeing, you know, strong growth. Those growth rates are normalizing to e-commerce growth rates.
You know, as we look at consumer behavior in marketplaces, marketplaces still represent a fraction of total retail volume. If we think over decades, not days, are more important to the consumption of goods globally, not just in the West, but even in emerging markets, right?
Yeah.
As emerging market economies look more and more like Western market economies, marketplaces will continue to grow. There is a growth driver in our business there, as well as our B2B franchise.
Right.
You know, the B2B business, which is 25% or so of our overall volume, 40% plus growth shows, I think, to investors globally that the solution for cross-border SMBs happens at Payoneer. And we're, you know, pretty excited about where we sit and the multi-year trajectory of the firm. We had guided at our investor day to midterm growth at 15% and 25% adjusted EBITDA. We've reaffirmed that. We feel comfortable and confident in the opportunity in front of us. We are disciplined on our costs. Headcount has been flat at Payoneer for two years. I took 9% of the company out July of 2023 and have held headcount largely flat, which is driving leverage unlock in our P&L. When we look at the multi-year, multi-decade future of Payoneer, it is true the market's corrected the last. There's uncertainty in the market. The last 30 days have been dynamic.
The value creation's in front of Payoneer. We're focused on our customers.
Yeah. I mean, you've definitely identified how to monetize customers and treat the right customers, you know, in a way that's a real business model versus, you know, I'd say a couple of years back, it was almost a little bit more you would, you know, apply more general pricing practices. You're a much more selective business now in terms of where you really, you know, apply pricing, which is the right approach. When we think of guidance, you mentioned your 15% outlook, 15, you know, plus % outlook in terms of growth longer term, but, and you just guided there actually for this year, for 2025, right? We came out of, and we exited, I think it was 25% or 26% growth at the end of fourth quarter, core revenue growth, I should say, 17% overall, but volumes up 18%. As you mentioned, B2B growing almost 40%.
Again, you're expecting 15, which, you know, as much as that's still very good, it shows that it was concerned. It was looked at by investors as either conservative or something slowing down. I'd love for you to address that a little bit because it was a common question we got coming out of the last quarter. Just help us, you know, bridge the assumptions moving from that 26% exit rate versus the mid-teens outlook.
Yeah, it's an interesting question, right? You know, 2024, 21% volume growth, 20% revenue growth x interest. The note on my note card is, I'm happy, proud, and confident. That's the honest answer, right? Like, we had an awesome year in 2024.
Yep.
That's awesome. Driven by marketplace volume, which grew mid-teens versus our guidance, which was high single digits. That's important because, you know, sellers, Payoneer customers who sell on Walmart or Amazon or eBay or Etsy or Mercado Libre, all of those platforms are competing to drive growth for themselves. We saw throughout 2024, we were pretty prudent, was the word we used. We said, hey, we're not, we don't want to get in front of the consumer. Those marketplaces performed really well, and we were a beneficiary of that. In the B2B, as you said, we guided to 25% last year and delivered 42%.
When I look at our 2025 guide in the context of 42% revenue growth over 24 months and show that we're guiding to 15% growth, which was our investor day target, the reaction from shareholders has been, frankly, perplexing a little bit because, you know, the view we have is the multi-year opportunity to serve customers. You remember our September 2023 investor day?
Sure.
If I had told you we were going to do 20% revenue growth coming off 5%.
I think people believed your targets then.
Right. We were a show me story, and we outperformed even our own wildest expectations.
Right. Right. It certainly was a barrier.
The confidence to deliver 15% growth in 2025, I think investors should see how pragmatic we are, how frankly prescient we are about where the market is and where the growth is. It is driven by high single-digit growth in marketplaces. We anticipate that. B2B growing 25% coming off a 42% year and modest take rate expansion, which is, again, an underlying power in our franchise. We have diversified and are growing in Latin America and APAC. These are our fastest growing markets, high B2B services markets, not goods, you know, our B2B business is 80% services for only 20% goods, and they are high take rate markets. When you see the portfolio mix, the size of customer mix, the geography mix at Payoneer, our company is healthier and stronger than it has ever been. We are expanding profitability.
3x growth in core business profitability in 2025 was our guide. You may ask about interest. For those of you who are new to Payoneer, $80 billion flowing through our platform, and our customers are holding $7 billion of balances with Payoneer, up 9% year over year. They hold them in their Payoneer account because of the utility of our accounts payable franchise, our cards, and our other tools.
Right.
We pay no yield on that. In fact, going from 2024 to 2025, we have a $40 million revenue headwind from interest. You know what we guided to for this year? Adjusted EBITDA flat year from 2024 to 2025, despite that $40 million headwind. Core business adjusted EBITDA growing 3x, core revenue growing 15%, and adjusted EBITDA flat year to year despite a $40 million headwind. We feel very good about the business and our guide.
How is your confidence on your guide in terms of this year versus where you started off the year last year in terms of, you know, your ability to achieve or maybe even outperform it?
Yeah, you know, our guidance philosophy is unchanged. You know, we are pragmatic and prudent about our guide. We believe in the execution of our team. You know, we communicated the data we saw in January, February is consistent with marketplace behavior overall and our guidance philosophy, and that's what we're seeing. How do I feel about our guide? I feel solid, confident, optimistic about the long-term prospects for Payoneer. I think there's, you know, we bought $137 million of our stock back last year at $5.60. We feel good about where we are, and we see a lot of opportunity.
That's great. John, obviously the noise in the market around tariffs is important, especially for a company that has, you know, cross-border aspects such as yours. You know, I think 20% of your ICPs and about a third of your revenues are tied to China clients. If you could just give us the latest update on your views on tariffs and migration efforts, maybe also just as an add-on to that, if you could explain why B2B goods businesses may be more impacted by tariffs than your marketplace businesses.
Yeah, this is obviously on everybody's minds, right?
Sure.
There is, let's acknowledge there's uncertainty. I think we all feel it. We see it. There's uncertainty when you wake up and you turn on Bloomberg to know what's going to happen.
Yep.
There's a broad range of outcomes as it relates to Payoneer. Our business is strong, as I've communicated, 190 countries, diverse in terms of the corridors where that money is flowing between. It's not just flowing US to China in our business. You know, when the company went public at $10 a share, 50% of our revenue came from China. Today, a couple of years later, it's a third. And that diversification of our revenue makes us a stronger and stronger business while we've had that 42% growth I described. 2 million active customers. The fastest growing markets are APAC and Latin America. China, as we're talking about, as we think about tariffs, a lot of volume, lowest take rate. So we are, you know, the sort of mantra inside of our office is profitable growth.
Right.
You drive profitable growth by adding more and more larger customers in higher take rate geographies. We are doing that. At the end of the day, you know, having been at Alibaba for five years through the first Trump administration, having experienced tariffs, there are entrepreneurs, and particularly small ones, who move fast, are resilient, and are global. When we talk to our customers around the world, modest tariff increases get absorbed in the supply chain.
Right.
Oh, you asked a question about B2B. Our B2B business, which had $2.5-$2.7 billion of volume in Q4, which is our fastest growing franchise in the business with a massive addressable TAM, like in our, like right in the sweet spot, there is a trillion dollars of volume. We are 80% services and 20% goods. You know, I feel good about the diversification of our customer base, the diversification of our geographies, our focus on high take rates. The uncertainty is, you know, distracting would be the right way, I guess, to say it, but we are powering through.
Okay. Your perception is, it sounds like generally the Chinese seller is going to absorb the price of inflation effectively if there is, or tariffs rather, if there is, to the degree that the buyers are, you know, it is just going to be part of the new norm effectively, right? On the B2B side, a lot of it is services effectively, 80%.
Yeah. It just depends on the rate, but trade is the thesis of Payoneer.
Right.
Global cross-border trade is the thesis. The opportunity, we are licensed globally, able to provide a trusted platform for sellers and services companies, regardless of where they sleep, what government they live under. We are able to provide a highly competitive solution for those customers, and I think we'll be just fine.
Okay. What are you seeing in e-com right now? You guys obviously have a great insight into e-com trends, just given your position in the market. Maybe just give us a quick update on what the trends look like for e-com, especially on the marketplaces, given how much you do with some of the biggest marketplaces around the world, and maybe into 2025 and just the runway for this kind of a, we've seen about high single digit growth in e-com now for some time.
Yeah, we are, it's exactly what you just said. You know, we have great visibility into the marketplace economies. And what we saw, our performance on marketplaces really is tied to the performance of the marketplaces themselves.
Sure.
Right? Like if, you know, if the seller wins the buy box and the consumer buys, Payoneer benefits. In 2024, we had guided to high single digit growth, frankly, largely because of the information coming out of the marketplaces themselves. They outperformed, and we took share, we outperformed, and I think we did a little better than that just because of our kick-ass execution, frankly. In 2025, we are guiding to high single digit growth. They are normalizing back to the sort of e-com growth rates of marketplaces. If you look over the last decade, marketplaces obviously had 30 some odd % growth during COVID. That snapped back down, you know, to a more reasonable growth rate.
8%-10% growth at marketplaces, I think, is what we'll see from them and consistent with what we saw at the end of Q4 and consistent with what we saw in January and February of this year.
Okay. Very helpful. Can we go to the growth algorithm one more time? I mean, you guys, you know, like you said, 15% for this year and even 20% plus has been, you know, in the cards for you guys. When we think about the algorithm to stay at these rates, maybe just remind us again how much of that is coming from incremental onboarding of new customers and ICPs, your most valuable customers, versus ARPU. We have talked a lot about pricing in the past also with you guys and more opportunity. Just broadly speaking, how do you think about that algorithm in terms of getting there between the two?
Yeah, we are, we're sort of a factory. The factory is ICP times ARPU minus cost to serve.
Yeah.
ICP, our ideal customers, is how we've clarified our thinking internally and helped have disclosures for investors so that you can understand the power in our business. Obviously, 2024 was a terrific year and everything working, you know, I said to my kids, everything we touched worked and the things we didn't touch worked too. That was sort of what powered the growth and the results in our business. Into 2025, we obviously have, coming off of our best year in the company's history, the comps are tougher, right? Because we're lapping our own kick-ass performance. In a macro environment that's more uncertain, guiding to 15% growth is pragmatic and prudent from my chair.
Sure.
Right? Our formula, ICP times ARPU minus cost to serve, 2024, 9% ICP growth, 21% ARPU growth, and cost being flat drove our company's performance. Our revenue and ARPU will grow faster than our customer ads or volume. That is important for folks to really understand and something we've communicated consistently. We talked about it at our September 2023 Investor Day that we will, we're adding higher value customers that are at the larger end of our ICP definition. You know, when I first joined Payoneer and became CEO two years ago, we saw, oh, $10,000 plus of accounts receivable into your Payoneer account, great profitability. Our sales organization went out to add those customers. Three months later, they came back and said, we're having success at $50,000 a month. Three months later, they came back and said, we're having success at $250,000 a month.
Our sales organization, which we have globally, on the ground in Lahore, on the ground in Manila, on the ground around the world, are focused on larger customers. The absolute ICP count, a little bit feels like a relic of the formula that we put in place. When we look at our customers, the largest customers have the best logo retention and net revenue retention. The confidence we have in the business we're building is really rooted in data that suggests we're solving a pain others don't solve. We're doing it in a very profitable and cost-efficient way. The unit economics of those customers are so good that if we look out across the multi-year, more customer segmentation will come from Payoneer, right? Rather than blunt force size, you know, we've done the size definition. We've done some geographic definition.
We're moving towards industry and product portfolio bundling. As the financial stack gets broader, we acquired a workforce management company in August of 2024. That integration's going well. As we move through the SMB P&L, what we want is, you know, remember Jerry Maguire, we want all the money. Like, show me the money here. We want all the money. And it's all the AR and all the AP of cross-border SMBs using our financial stack. New products getting attached. I think we shared at Q4, 53% of our customers use three or more AP products today. In Q1 of 2022, that was 40%. We're attaching more products. We're adding more valuable customers. We're segmenting more even more efficiently in the organization. You mentioned pricing, right? We added $30 million of incremental pricing in 2024.
We have a guide to continue to do that because we've gone from a one-size-fits-all pricing model to one that's getting more and more bespoke. As it gets more bespoke by corridor, by geography, by SIC code, by bundle, we're able to monetize our customers even better. Those 55,000 10K plus ICPs are moving to a relationship-based pricing model. That gives us even more opportunity.
Just in terms of ICPs, I mean, maybe just for the audience and those on the webcast, just reminding people, you know, the number of customers you have, the number of ICPs, and then really the top of funnel, what are you doing to attract? Because you're getting, it always blows my mind at, what is it, 300,000 applications per month, I think, for a new potential customer to come in and use your platform. It's just pretty incredible.
Yeah, it is amazing to folks sitting on whatever 50th Street in Manhattan. You know, if we were doing this event in the Philippines, 5,000 people would come, right? Payoneer is a powerful, meaningful brand to, you know, not to give a commercial for us, but it's like there's a lot of entrepreneurial ambition out there in the world. We're the bridge between people's ambition and their achievement because they can't do business without us. They need a solution like ours. As you said, we get 11 million applications a year. That's a lot of entrepreneurial energy flying into the Payoneer platform saying, hey, I want to be a business owner. Some of those people are like my 20-year-old daughter who are, you know, really smart, but have no revenue, right? You know, and she's got AP but no AR, let's just put it that way.
We're focused on using our data and our machine learning algorithms to identify out of those 11 million people who show up to Payoneer, the lookalikes that look like our best ICPs. We're getting smarter and smarter at saying, ooh, this person in this geography is a lookalike to those. Let's get them on the phone in 12 hours with a salesperson, understand their needs, and get them signed up and onboarded quickly. The 11 million in some ways is a vanity metric, you know, because it's exciting, but I can't monetize all those people, right? Like I want to focus on profitable growth. Profitable growth is not absolute numbers, although they're fun to talk about. It's actually optimizing that funnel to turn as much of that energy into monetization for our shareholders. You know, 9% ICP growth. Oh, you asked and I didn't say.
2 million active customers in every industry, people in this room and around the world can understand trading, doing business with, trading with other companies around the globe and using Payoneer as the financial guts, the financial stack of making that possible.
I mean, the average growth was what, 9% in 2024 for ICPs? You are obviously looking, as you mentioned, to really hone in on larger ICPs, right? Maybe just talk about that dynamic a little more and how you are doing that and what you anticipate in terms of the growth and the mix.
What we will see is revenue will grow faster than volume and ARPU will grow faster than ICP acquisition. You know, if I could waver, I guess I could wave a magic wand, but the disclosure we would do would be more nuanced if we were starting doing it over again. We're not going to change it, but like, you know, the disclosure might be more nuanced to segment those customers more. You can see in our B2B business, 25% growth in every region we did business in. If you look at that with the ICP focus on larger ICPs and the size of the B2B opportunity, we are in a position to drive cross-sell, more attachment of products and better pricing. You know, I haven't talked about the card. You know, we had 36%.
We have a, for those of you who don't know, in our AP stack, we have physical and virtual cards that our customers use, the physical card for their employees when they travel around the world to manage their expenses and the virtual cards for when they buy logistics or marketing or other, they procure online. Our card business grew 36% in Q4 and had six straight quarters of 30+% growth, which is awesome, right? Because people are using Payoneer to manage their expenses. The more they do that, the longer they stay Payoneer customers and the more money we make from them. $80 billion of volume into the Payoneer account and $5.5 billion spent on card.
While I'm jumping up and down and I'm super excited about our card growth and all the businesses I talk to that are using it, we're just at the beginning of that card journey, right? Like that card is a, you know, I shared with you at an earlier conversation, we're seeing customers choose Payoneer just because of our card. I was talking to our salespeople in Dubai the other day where there's a lot of Middle East marketing services firms that choose Payoneer to manage the campaigns of all of their customers. They're signing up for Payoneer for a card and our virtual cards, they're taking funds from their old physical bank, putting them into their Payoneer account. There's no AR attached to them. The addressable opportunity is not their sales, it's their balance sheet. That's pretty exciting.
When we talk about TAM and SAM at Payoneer, we're not talking about all the money they're holding in their local bank. We're just talking about their transactional volume. We're on the right side of selling a full financial stack to customers around the globe.
I mean, you mentioned it, but look, I mean, obviously ARPU has been benefiting from the, you know, the shift of customers using more and more products. Like you said, 53% of customers now using three plus products or services versus 40%, I think in the early part of 2022. I mean, pricing has been such a big opportunity for you guys because you've been much more strategic about it in the last year or two. We've been excited about it. I think you still, I mean, you talk about another, I think you had $30 million of revenue benefit last year, another year this year of incremental $30 million from pricing. I mean, you have so much volume that's intranetwork that's really still not monetized, right? Just can you explain again what you still have on the horizon around pricing opportunities?
Yeah, I think people should understand this as Payoneer had a one-size-fits-all pricing model for decades. The team came in and we decided to pick some low-hanging fruit two years ago and start identifying pricing opportunities that were easy. You know, if Payoneer colleagues are listening, I know your work isn't easy, but it was easier to achieve. That was based on size, based on geography, some pricing. We now have product-specific pricing opportunities. You referenced our intranetwork flows. For those of you who are new to Payoneer, $80 billion of volume flowing into the platform does not include $10 billion-plus of volume moving between Payoneer account holders.
If Darren has a Payoneer account and he's in Argentina and I have a Payoneer account and I'm in Colombia, I can make a payment to him, sort of Venmo him, for lack of a better way of thinking about it, between one account and another. We've just begun charging for that cross-border volumes, right? The domestic to domestic was sort of a treasury function. We're doing less charging, but between countries, that is a cross-border volume. We're beginning to look at ways to monetize and we've started to. Some of it actually uncovers the internal networks in our business. Let's picture a customer. There's a real story. A woman who's an entrepreneur here in the United States in Texas provides outsourced billing services to dental offices across the Southeast and Southwest. I think she has 500 or so dental offices.
She hires contractors in Latin America to do the billing. She then gets paid into her Payoneer account from those doctor's offices, those dentists. She makes payments to her contractors who are across Latin America. Those folks then use their card when they take business trips up to the United States for their annual event and conferences. The money flows into the platform, moves through the platform, and then is spent on a Payoneer card. There isn't a financial services provider she could go to that would be as easy to use, as mobile-friendly, you know, as frankly, I think focused on her with the service that we offer in Payoneer.
That's great. I mean, it seems like that's still one example of an opportunity, but there's so many pricing opportunities throughout the business still. Guys, just in interest of time, I'm going to probably turn it to the audience for questions. John, I mean, when we think about capital allocation as folks are thinking about it, any updated thoughts around capital allocation this year, M&A maybe? I mean, just how do you think about, you know, using your balance sheet in any way?
Yeah, we have just under $500 million of cash on our balance sheet, and we generate a lot of cash. This is a healthy cash-producing company. Our M&A, we've done three transactions in the last 24 months, all sub $100 million. We are a tuck-in acquirer to add capability. We bought a workforce management company headquartered in Singapore last year to help us with our expansion of the financial stack with contractor and global employee management. That's going well. The integration's on pace, and it's part of the evolution of what we offer.
We've communicated, we have passed all the regulatory approvals to acquire a licensed business in China, which will expand our licensing framework in the first half of this year, which, you know, when the company went public a number of years ago, was probably the number one risk factor on the minds of investors was China and licenses. China is a smaller share of our total, and we will be licensed in China, which is great. You know, we've been operating, but it'll be nice to have that. We'll be one of three firms, Western firms with that license, which is, I think, a powerful asset for us. In terms of future acquisitions, we see opportunities in spend management, the software that businesses use to track their expenses.
My view is from a build, buy, and partner perspective, buy things when they have proven product-market fit, where they have sort of worked the P&L kinks out so they're not, you know, losing a lot of money, but they have not unlocked distribution. Because Payoneer has powerful customer acquisition dynamics and great distribution, we can attach more products to our customers. We've proven it. We're seeing ourselves do it. We can keep selling more products to our customers, which will drive increased retention and better ARPU. You and I have talked about this in the past. When I worked at Alibaba, we saw we had 187,000 customers when I got there paying us $5,000. Four years later, we had 217,000 customers paying us $15,000. We went from $880 million in revenue to $3.5 billion, from $200 million of EBITDA to $800 million of EBITDA.
SMBs globally want one-stop shop trust and a simple way to do business. If your value exceeds your price, you can push a lot through that pipe. That is what we are doing.
Let me take questions. John, your stock had a great year last year. Obviously the whole market has pulled back and now concern around tariffs. What about buybacks? I mean, you're obviously talking about M&A, but you did some buybacks last year. What are your thoughts now?
Yeah, we bought $137 million of stock last year at $5.60. We're authorized and continuing to buy. I am a believer in what we're doing.
You sound pretty confident.
Yeah. You know, look, there's uncertainty in the market. I don't want to say it's like a, you know, it hasn't been the easiest 30 days. You know, but what we talk about.
That's a market standpoint. You're saying from a company.
Our customers want what we have. Our team is qualified and capable to deliver it. Our brand is unlike any other.
Questions?
Hi John, thanks. I wanted to ask a bit about the opportunities in terms of marketplace penetration. Are there any meaningful marketplaces, newer marketplaces where Payoneer maybe doesn't have a connection and still has opportunities on that side of the network?
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, the world's marketplaces, you know, the Western marketplaces we have exceptional relationships with. The emerging marketplaces, Temu, Shein, TikTok, and others are opportunities that we continue to work to penetrate and take and provide service and value to. There's innovative, I think, and this is me sharing my internal view of this. I think some of those Western marketplaces will spend real energy in the emerging markets as they seek to unlock additional growth for themselves. That is a genuine opportunity for Payoneer over the decade, we'll call it. Because if I was sitting at one of those marketplaces seeing slow, you know, normalized growth in the West, but the consumption economy and the rise of the middle class in emerging markets is growing, that's what powers marketplace growth. The access to high-quality, low-cost products is what people want.
I think that that will be an area of opportunity. Our marketplace team, which is actually headquartered here, has KPIs and goals all around penetration, acquisition, onboarding, relationships with additional partners. We love those relationships. They're really important to us. We cultivate them and nurture them. We think there's an opportunity for more growth there.
Great. Guys, thank you.