Israeli fintech powerhouse Payoneer recruiting 300 new employees globally

Israeli fintech company Payoneer is expanding and recruiting 300 new employees, half of them in Israel and the other half across its dozens of branches around the world.

Over half of the positions are in R&D, including software engineers and IT, with the rest spread across the company's different sectors, including product and project managers, and operation and marketing roles.

"We want to recruit these employees as quickly as possible. This is a plan that needs to be implemented as soon as possible. We have several projects that require employees and the recruiting is a project in itself," Payoneer COO Keren Levy told Calcalist. "We are working from home and we have offices in China and Hong Kong which made it easier for us to allow our Israeli employees to work from home. We will be conducting most of the job interviews in Israel over Zoom, but at a certain stage we will also be interviewing them face-to-face."

Founded in 2005 and based in central Israel with additional offices in New York and Hong Kong, Payoneer provides online money transfer and digital payment services. Users can pay and receive funds via several methods, including credit cards, debit cards, electronic wallets, and bank transfers. The company has raised approximately $245 million to date.

Levy said that the company initially waited to see how the Covid-19 crisis would affect its business but decided to expand after quickly seeing that the pandemic was strengthening the online money transfer and digital payment sectors.

"After a few weeks, we saw that we are riding all the current trends in the global economy, other than tourism, which is now also beginning to recover," said Levy, adding that the company is also considering an IPO. "We have been thinking about doing an IPO for a while. All our growth engines are working and we are continuing to develop our platform. We have a revenue of $300 million and are very well suited for an IPO. But that isn't our goal, but rather part of our path. We are looking at how to achieve our goals and an IPO is a very decent option."

Payoneer employs 1,500 across the world, 900 of them in Israel. The accelerated digitization process in a wide range of sectors due to the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the demand for the services provided by the company, which was already one of the biggest money transfer businesses in the world, including for the likes of Amazon and Walmart.

"The new world that was created in 2020 requires us to move forward quickly," said Payoneer CTO Noam Oren. "We are reassessing our customer experience, adding capabilities and refreshing the user experience, and of course are required to take another leap in scale. We are deepening the automatization both in our internal processes and in the tools and models used by our internal and external clients. We want to add people who will help us get stronger, improve, adopt new tools and build additional services with the new opportunities we have been given and out of the understanding we now have regarding our new needs and complexities."