All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today, both in person and online. My name is Chris Kennedy. I'm the research analyst at William Blair, covering the fintech and payments space. For a complete list of research disclosures and/or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. Next up, we have Payoneer. From the company, we have the CEO, John Caplan, and the CFO, Bea Ordonez. Payoneer does a lot of things, but at the core, they help their customers connect to the global economy. Now, the tariff situation has created a little bit of uncertainty, but overall, the financial results have been solid. The company had over $270 million of EBITDA last year, and that compares to about $28 million back in 2021. It shares are trading below kind of where they came out in the market debut.
With that, let me turn it over to John.
It's great to be here. Thanks for welcoming me, and it's great to see so many of you here today. I'm excited about Payoneer, excited to share the company with you. We are a great business benefiting from some significant secular trends. The digitization of global commerce is one. The next is the globalization of workforces around the globe and the services economy. Most significantly, the diversification of global trade. Chris mentioned the reshaping of trade that's underway through the tariff environment. That is a short-term headwind, as we've talked about, but an extraordinary long-term tailwind for our firm. We're well-positioned to benefit. Speaking to investors specifically, we represent a very good investment opportunity. We are in the highest growth, fast-growing emerging markets around the world. We do business in 190 countries and territories.
We are leading the disruption of the global B2B payments sector, and we will talk about the momentum we have there. We have, most importantly, a branded relationship with SMBs themselves, which is, in addition to our licenses, our bank relationships, our 7,000 corridors of trade, we are well-positioned to continue to benefit as trade is more and more growing. A bit about the mission of the firm and the intensity that we operate about going after that mission. The first is the purpose that 2,400 colleagues in the world join me on. This mission is to connect the world's cross-border businesses to a rising global economy.
One of the silver linings of the last couple of months is, I think, folks around the world now recognize just how interconnected we all are, and that the ideas or the concepts around retreating or decoupling are not practical approaches to how global trade will operate. As I mentioned, we have customers in 190 countries and territories. All of them are engaged in cross-border trade. For folks here in Chicago or in the U.S., that may not realize, in most of the globe, when you start a business, you start as a global company. You're either sourcing from or selling to or hiring people outside of your home borders. Here in Chicago, you could get rich between Milwaukee, Chicago, and Pittsburgh and never get a passport. In Ho Chi Minh City or Mexico City or Lahore, Pakistan, that largely is not true.
What Payoneer stands to benefit by building the financial solution for those companies that are underserved by global banks, their local banks do not have either the technology or capability or ability to serve them, and we do. Our customers are all engaged in cross-border trade. They are marketing companies, IT companies, business process outsourcers in the Philippines, software engineers in Brazil, goods exporters from China. They are selling wholesale, direct to the business customers or through marketplaces. We take the fundamental complexity out of cross-border trade for our customers, and that is a very significant benefit because, generally, customers who are trying to operate globally need to be able to sell to and hire globally. The financial services infrastructure of the globe is not designed for them. Our financial results prove our value prop.
Our business has seen great volume growth, money that flows into the Payoneer platform, $80 billion in 2024. We hold $7 billion or thereabouts of customer funds for our customers. We pay no yield on those funds, yet monetize that interest. We've seen our revenue compound annual growth rate of 27% over the last number of years. Again, exceptional revenue growth in the firm. Our adjusted EBITDA continues to be impressive, as Chris mentioned, $270 million of core business adjusted EBITDA. When Bea Ordonez, our CFO, and I took our leadership roles in March of 2023, Payoneer was coming off a year of single-digit revenue growth and core business unprofitable. In 2025, we turned $25 million of negative core adjusted EBITDA into $14 million of positive adjusted EBITDA, where we grew revenue 20%. Q1 of 2025, we had 16% revenue growth and $7 million of core business adjusted EBITDA.
We are seeing steady volume growth, increasing customer funds on our platform. Revenue is outpacing volume growth, greater than 2x since going public, to nearly $1 billion of revenue in 2024. For those newer to the Payoneer story, our business model is primarily ad valorem, and we have demonstrated significant take-rate expansion, unlike other financial services firms that see take-rate compression. In fact, we have steadily grown our take-rate during our tenure leading the business. As the numbers demonstrate, significantly faster profitability growth. We have nearly 10x'd our adjusted EBITDA during the same period here. I think that is a really important thing when you look about the value unlock, which is coming out of our operational discipline, our pricing discipline, our data discipline, and an extraordinary group of leaders globally who are obsessed with providing value and support for global cross-border SMBs.
Our strategy and how we're growing the firm is really direct. We are focused on adding and supporting cross-border SMB businesses. Those are folks that have 1,000 employees, like a customer I met from Serbia recently who's got customers all across Europe, to individual freelancers who may be in Brazil or Argentina or business process outsourcers in the Philippines. We are expanding and helping our customers move into markets where they're not. Today, 15% of our revenue comes from China-based sellers that are selling to the rest of the world, but not the United States. We have a very strong franchise there and one that we anticipate continued strong growth. We're investing in additional products for our customers. Last August, we acquired a workforce management platform that enables us to help our customers who have global employees to be able to pay those folks.
We are moving our business upmarket with larger and larger customers, which bring more volume, revenue, and net revenue retention into the firm, and diversifying the products we offer, and the result of which is exceptional growth to our ARPU, strong take-rate dynamics, and efficiencies in our business. Our business is just about as diversified as you could get: 190 countries and territories, goods companies, services companies, individual freelancers, and groups of software developers. Across segments and brands, we have a branded relationship with B2B customers around the world. Those are SMBs that sell on marketplaces and those that are using direct-to-consumer merchant services. We have an enterprise payouts business, which leverages the rails, the payment rails in our networks of relationships we have built, helping enterprises that want to leverage the Payoneer platform in our network to move money around the globe. We serve customers in five key markets.
Those customers sell around the globe. They may be in Dubai, or they may be in Vietnam, or they may be in Indonesia, but they are businesses that are actively participating in global trade. In Q1, our business in Latin America and APAC saw 20% revenue growth. That 20% revenue growth, which was greater than the firm's overall 16% revenue growth, I think indicates how diverse our firm is. We earn our money from funds coming into the Payoneer platform. We earn interest income on the balances we hold for our customers. I think there's some misconception about this, so I might as well address this head-on.
Unlike a payroll company where $1 comes in at 8:00 A.M. and leaves by 3:00 P.M., our customers hold many months of balances on the Payoneer platform because they are using our accounts payable products to manage their international expenses. We even see now hundreds of millions of dollars moving from analog traditional banks into Payoneer accounts because our customers want to use our best-in-breed AP tools. The complexity of cross-border trade, I think the world has gotten a fast lesson in that over the last eight weeks. Our multi-currency accounts receivable, treasury, FX, and accounts payable all happen through a single Payoneer account in the palm of your hand. If you are the CFO of a multinational SMB business, and you are based anywhere around the globe, you can operate your business successfully. We have built a moat around the business that is getting bigger.
Over the last 20 years, licenses in the U.S., EU, U.K., Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and now in China, the third foreign company after Visa and PayPal to have this license, we have announced that most recently. We have relationships with the world's largest marketplaces: our friends at Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Airbnb, Walmart, Mercado Libre, Coupang, you name a marketplace, we are likely doing business with them. We have a global network of over 100 bank relationships. This network is difficult to replicate and one we treasure and work diligently with our banking partners to provide solutions for SMBs around the world. We have integrations with QuickBooks or Zoho or other tools that SMBs around the world use. Think of that as the ecosystem of software that an entrepreneur needs so that she can participate in global trade.
Further strengthening all of the things I've mentioned that we've put in place, the account itself is such a high value and utility that it drives its own stickiness. The more someone uses it, the stickier our business becomes, which is the reason why last August we bought a workforce management company based in Singapore, which enabled us to offer to our customers and net new customers the ability to pay global employees. As people hire around the world, you don't need to hire just geographically anymore. COVID proved that to all of us. Now, the most innovative firms are finding talent in Latin America and APAC and globally to operate their businesses. I feel good about where we are and the ecosystem we've built.
At a recent conference, we announced that we had just signed a new partnership with Alibaba.com to help India-based entrepreneurs participate and get access to the Payoneer platform. I think shareholders will be pleased to know that we continue to make steady headway in expanding our marketplace relationships. The single Payoneer Account is the core value prop, a multi-currency account that has everything a business needs to either pay someone, either someone in the existing Payoneer network, which is a capability we have, which is $10 billion+ of additional volume on our platform in addition to the $80 billion I referenced a moment ago, enables them to get paid, whether they sell wholesale or B2B, one business to another, whether they sell direct to a consumer if they're in the e-commerce or goods space, or if they distribute their capability via marketplace.
That could be a services provider on Fiverr or a goods exporter who's selling on Amazon. The account is mobile and desktop. What's fascinating about, and I don't want to age myself, but I prefer to do my financial transactions personally from a desktop. Most of the globe, where entrepreneurs are getting younger and more mobile, it's actually all the capability in the palm of your hand is actually what the entrepreneurs need. What's so significant about that is that our mobile capability furthers the gap between us and the old world traditional bank folks that we're taking share from, who not only don't have the capability, don't have the engineers, and are decades away, or maybe that's overstating it, from having the mobile ability.
Our ICPs, our ideal customers, of which we have 550,000 + of our 2 million active customers, log into their Payoneer account every other day. I think the engagement we have with our customers is further testimony to the value that we're providing. We acquire and serve our customers in 190 countries and territories. As I mentioned before, they are in APAC, which is 31% of our total ICPs, China, which is 20%, EMEA, 29%, Latin America, 14%, here in the United States and North America, 6%. We have over 100 folks that are our customer support managers working with our best and biggest customers around the world, and we're in 35 countries with on-the-ground capability.
I think one of the biggest differentiators for Payoneer, unlike sort of tech startup fintechs that are maybe name brands that folks in this room may be familiar with, is we are local and part of the ecosystems where our customers are. We are not writing code in San Francisco and praying somebody in Lahore uses it. We are at the event on a Thursday afternoon in Pakistan with our customers, helping them onboard. Our team speaks over 20 languages, and being in the ecosystem, we think, is a significant competitive advantage. Let's talk about the differences between our customers. We have what we call B2B SMBs, and this is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity and what we believe will be our biggest growth driver going forward and one that is the core investment thesis for our business and one that we think people should stand up and pay attention to.
90% of all cross-border payment activity is still happening at traditional banks. Like I've said now the fourth time, they do not have the technology, multi-currency account capability, 24/7 support services that we offer. We have single-digit market share in some pretty important global markets and intend to continue to grow that. Another customer segment are those businesses that sell on marketplaces where we have approximately 20% share. This is not easy to get and super hard to dislodge. We innovated and pioneered this ability to help global sellers who sell on marketplaces, and we feel very comfortable about our position and our ability to continue to operate that business. We have an enterprise payouts business, as I referred to, enterprises that leverage our payment rails to pay hosts, to pay vendors, to pay suppliers globally.
Let's talk about our ideal customer: 550,000 ICPs, those that are receiving over $120,000 a year as a minimum amount of accounts receivable represent over 50% of our revenue. I think this is an important distinction and one that folks should understand. We've steadily, intentionally been driving our business upmarket. When Bea and I arrived at Payoneer, it was pricing was universal and everyone was welcome. Now we have a much more bespoke pricing machine, a product designed to help SMB-grade customers, and a focus on adding and retaining larger and larger businesses, less concerned about the absolute count and much more concerned and focused on driving profitable revenue growth, as we've demonstrated. 2 million overall customers, but not every customer is created equal, as I've described. We define the ICP as a customer who receives at minimum $6,000 of trailing 12-month volume into our business.
Those 500,000 ICPs represent 90% of our total revenue. The growth of the firm is really exciting, and our growth is coming from both expanding who we serve, what we sell them, and doing it in an intentional way that we are adding high-value revenue into the firm. You can see on these slides that in APAC and Latin America, where I described a moment ago the 20% revenue growth, our take rate is more than double what it is, for example, in China. We have tier-one countries all across Latin America and APAC where we are seeing strong momentum. Together, Latin America and APAC represent one-third of our overall revenues, and we are driving both faster growth in these regions and also product innovation there. 600 million people in Latin America, 1 billion in India.
We are well-positioned to continue to drive solid growth into the future. What we've been doing that I think is important is when people, I think, who've known Payoneer for five years think of us, they generally think of us as an AR company helping global businesses in the East or businesses in the South get access to the West. We are far more than that. We are as much an AP company as we are an AR company. We've consistently been adding more AP products to the financial stack, cross-selling those products successfully, and the impact of that is strong: logo retention, volume retention, and revenue retention. They use our AP to pay suppliers, pay international employees, and use our card.
We've had over 30% growth in our Payoneer cards business for, I don't know if it's seven quarters or six quarters, I can't remember off the top of my head. That growth of $5.4 billion spent on Payoneer cards in 2024, when you had $80 billion flowing across the Payoneer platform in 2024, gives you some indication of just how much headroom there is. Usage of more than three AP products was 40% in the first quarter of 2022 and greater than 50% in the first quarter of 2025. The value of the Payoneer account continues to grow, and it's growing. At the same time, revenue's growing 40-some odd percent, and profitability and margins have expanded. We've been delivering strong revenue-per-customer expansion over the last couple of years.
We've been delivering it through a combination of pricing, product mix, customers we attract, and we expect our ARPU to grow faster than our ICP count. That's intentional, right? Because as we drive high-value customers and moderate our cost to serve, that unlocks leverage in our business. We see in front of ourselves significant opportunity to cross-sell, upsell, and drive our business toward larger, multi-entity, multi-geography customers who have more complex needs for us to serve. You can see our take rate expansion at 119 basis points at the end of Q1. I think this is notable for folks because we've demonstrated a track record of consistently expanding it, and what's somewhat unique within financial services and payments highlights, I think, our unique position.
I think underappreciated largely because when you have a branded relationship with a business, when we can have more and more bespoke pricing, we can capture more revenue and do so with customers who are happy to pay us. In terms of our cash, we have a strong balance sheet. We generate a lot of cash, and we can invest for growth and return for shareholders: $500 million on our balance sheet and no debt. We have kept the cash balance stable over the past three years, even as we have generated significant cash in the business, and we have been able to return capital to our shareholders via our repurchase program and invest in future growth.
We've made three acquisitions, all sub-$100 million over the last 24 months: tuck-in acquisition of sort of think of it as an aqua hire, a product acquisition, the workforce management, and the license acquisition in China. Three different flavors of strategy to create value for our customers and ultimately expand our capability. When we take a step back and think about the value creation of Payoneer, the utility of our business, and the momentum in the firm, we have the opportunity to be the significant financial services partner to the world's cross-border businesses. There isn't a financial services firm legacy, one of the old ones, fintech, or one of the stablecoin upstarts that have the assets, licenses, branded relationships that we do. We are a high-growth and profitable business, unlocking real leverage in our business now that we've passed our 20th anniversary and are in our third decade.
I think there's a significant moat around our business and significant momentum in our business, and that's, I think, significant again. There you go. And a multi-year track record of delivering profitable growth. To our team, probably the most important dynamic. We've communicated and maintain that we will deliver mid-teens revenue growth and 25% adjusted EBITDA margins in the medium term. We certainly delivered that in the first quarter of this year. All of 2024, we exceeded that. We are ahead of the plan that we laid out as a management team at our September of 2023 Investor Day, and we feel really great about the results we've delivered and the momentum in the firm. I'll leave it there. I want to say thank you to William Blair. I love coming to this conference. I think you guys put on a great event, and the conversations are meaningful.
People are informed. It's great to see so many people interested in the Payoneer firm, and we'll be back. If we're invited, we'll definitely be back. Chris, back to you.
Sure. No, thank you for that. Looks like we do have a little bit of time for questions. Feel free to don't be shy in the audience. I guess I'll just ask one. You've been meeting with a lot of investors. I mean, what's the disconnect in your view? What don't investors understand? Because you see the financial results, but yet-
Yeah, I think thank you for asking that question because I think it's an important one. We are a management team that's delivered more than we promised, and we've done that consistently, and the opportunity is bigger than what we communicated.
What I would encourage investors to do is roll up your sleeves and do a bit of homework to understand just how cross-border financial services work. I do not think investors give us fair credit for our interest revenue. $6 billion+ of customer funds that grow in lockstep with our volume growth that we pay no yield on, that is not pass-through revenue the way you think of an ADP or somebody else like that. It is proof of the trust our customers have in our business and the value they see in the account. They are moving hundreds of millions of dollars from their local bank where they may earn interest, moving into a Payoneer account where they earn none to use our card. You are paying me, giving us zero multiple on that revenue? That seems like someone needs to sharpen a pencil and do a little homework.
The second, I think folks have been concerned about our business as it relates to having gone public via SPAC and that at the time, coming off the pandemic, we were looking at Amazon and China as a risk. 20% of our revenue is China direct to the United States. 98% of the strollers sold and the carriages sold in the United States are manufactured in China. As a parent, I am excited for antibiotics to be manufactured near to home because it is good for my kids and my in-laws. I think that is great. I do think baby strollers are going to be manufactured not in the United States. I think the notion that investors think that because of our China exposure, it is a weakness, they are missing the narrative. Our China business is a strength. 15% of our revenue is China entrepreneurs selling to the rest of the world.
Those tracks are deep and late. China is the number one trading partner with over 100 countries around the world. Visa, PayPal, and Payoneer are the foreign companies that have the license that we have. We are the only one of those three that are expressly focused on cross-border entrepreneurs and helping them operate. PayPal's got a great business, but they got a lot of stuff to do. Visa, obviously a great company and a ton to do. We are the only one totally focused on cross-border SMBs. I think people are missing that. I think another thing people are missing is I think there is concern because if you look at the financial services industry, you think, "Take rates go to zero." Look at the data. Bea and I have proven, and our team have proven over the last 36 months that Payoneer take rates do not go to zero.
They go up. We feel comfortable telling people our take rates are going up because they are. Look at the data. People say, "Look at our information and say, 'Hey, ICP growth isn't as quick as we would like it to be.'" I think I wouldn't focus on what I'll think of as important but vanity metrics. What matters is the core underlying dynamics in our firm is our volume is growing in a strong way. Our revenue is growing faster than our volume, and our expenses are growing half the rate of our revenue growth. Expenses growing half the rate of revenue growth, revenue growing faster than volume growth, and a profitable business with $500 million on the balance sheet generating $100 million + of free cash flow.
I don't know how many companies are here at this event, which is awesome to see so many people here, but we are one of the best performing in the turnaround of Payoneer from losing $25 million in 2023 and being a 4% revenue growth business to 2024, 20% revenue growth and $14 million of core business EBITDA. There's a lot of value in this business, and I would encourage people who, if you haven't, there's a lot of people here, so it's exciting for us to see so many new faces around our business. I would encourage you to engage with our IR team, learn the business because we share a lot, and it's important. Once you get into it, you see just how much moat and leverage there is in our business.
Great. With that, we're going to have to leave it there.
We do have a breakout session after this. Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody. It's great to see so many new faces.