About ten years ago I ran a property management company in the Caribbean. Airbnb was new, getting paid in those markets was hard, and one of the few options that always worked was Payoneer.
A lot has changed since then. Stablecoins arrived, and every week in San Francisco I meet someone launching a neobank on stablecoin rails. So I asked John Caplan, Payoneer’s CEO, how a company that has been doing cross-border payments for over two decades thinks about all this.
A few things that stood out:
The last mile is the killer app. “You can’t buy orange juice in Pakistan with USDC.” For John, moving money quickly is the easy part. What matters is turning it into local currency someone can actually spend.
Certainty beats price. Cross-border customers care about certainty and trust more than shaving a few basis points. John’s view is that too-good-to-be-true pricing usually isn’t worth the risk.
Slow and steady on stablecoins. Payoneer partnered with Bridge rather than building its own, opened a waitlist that about 17,000 businesses applied to, and has applied for a stablecoin bank charter.
Where the growth is. John thinks the next century of innovation comes from places like Jakarta, Bangalore and Hangzhou. Payoneer’s customers are the businesses below the threshold that multinational banks will serve.
Resilience. After the 2025 tariffs, his customers diversified their supply chains and distribution. “I’m on offense,” as one BPO owner in the Philippines told him.
We also get into John’s path from Starbucks and Alibaba to Payoneer, why analysts should talk less about price and more about net revenue retention, and what he expects from consolidation in payments.
