Over the past year, companies worldwide have taken measures to address uncertainty brought on by massive regulatory, geopolitical, and technological changes. For Payoneer, a New York-based company providing remittance and digital payment services, shifts in the global trade landscape are both "a threat and an opportunity," the company's Chief Financial Officer Bea Ordonez told CFO Dive.

"I think in times of volatility and dislocation, business owners tend to seek diversification and de-risking," she said in an interview. When Payoneer examines its role in this ecosystem, the focus is on "how do we support that ambition?" she added.

A strategy of simplifying complexity

For many companies and their finance leaders, the keyword for 2025 is "volatility." CFOs have had to navigate a wide range of changes, from price pressures to the potential uses of new technologies like artificial intelligence. However, despite the "very stop-and-go" nature of tariffs and the macroeconomic environment over the past year, global trade has shown a certain resilience, Ordonez said.

To navigate this uncertainty, Ordonez summarized Payoneer's strategy as: "You have to focus on what you can control and learn to adapt to what you cannot control."

According to her LinkedIn profile, Ordonez has served as Payoneer's CFO since January 2023. Previously, she was Chief Innovation Officer at Webster Bank and held CFO roles at Starling Bank and OTC Markets Group.

She noted that a key differentiator for the company is that, despite being a global business, it is "highly localized," and this "North Star" principle will continue to guide its strategy through 2026.

According to a shareholder presentation dated December 29, Payoneer's global network covers 7,000 "trade routes," with partnerships with nearly 100 banks and payment service providers, and currently holds eightmarket business payment licenses. Additionally, according to a January 22 press release, the company recently announced it has receivedin-principle authorization from the Reserve Bank of Indiato operate as a cross-border payment aggregator in the region.

As the financial services company begins the new year, its focus will be on continuing to provide localized services globally. This means both "ensuring we continue to invest in the core ecosystem, the tech stack, and the money movement capabilities... and also through innovation, continuing to unlock value for the next 20 years," Ordonez said. The company, founded in 2005, celebrated itstwentieth anniversary last year。

Promising use cases ahead

While continuing to expand partnerships with key local and global partners such as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and payment peer Stripe, Payoneer is also eyeing new technologies. The company is "investing in a stablecoin-enabled strategy that we find very interesting," Ordonez said. She told CFO Dive in a June interview thatstablecoins are "complementary" to Payoneer's business。

Stablecoins are digital assets whose value is pegged to another asset, typically a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar. In 2025, stablecoins gained more attention from business leaders and payment providers as the administration of President Donald Trump took steps to push these assets into the financial mainstream. This includeslegislation such as the GENIUS Act, which sets some requirements for stablecoin issuers but still leaves regulatory and risk gaps that some companies and the industry are still navigating.

In August, Payoneer announced a partnership with Citi aimed at using the bank's blockchain technology to transfer funds between Payoneer's own accounts. This is the first step in a long-term strategy to "deploy stablecoin capabilities and integrate them into our treasury management processes," Ordonez said. While these assets can bring key advantages to treasury management and cross-border payments, "barriers to entry" remain as the industry continues to seek regulatory clarity, she said.

Payoneer is also keeping an eye on artificial intelligence and has found some "really promising use cases" for agentic AI in its support and customer relationship management teams, she said.

On a personal level, Ordonez finds generative AI useful in administrative areas: although "I can definitely tell when people are using generative AI to write or reply to emails, and I'm not sure I like it," she said.

The company once launched a performance review tool that used large language models to enhance or supplement employee-written content, and Ordonez said she did not particularly appreciate that application. However, she believes such tasks are not where generative AI's potential is best realized.

"In risk monitoring, transaction monitoring, how to manage large and complex risk models, how to truly automate processes and procedures in cross-border money movement—that's where I see more value," she said. "I guess I could also have AI rewrite my emails, but everyone would notice. I'm not sure how helpful that is."