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This episode made me rethink how growth actually happens in fintech.
We often assume it’s about launching new features, entering new markets, or riding macro trends. But what stood out to me in my conversation with John Caplan, CEO of @Payoneer, is that real growth came from something much less visible.
First, fixing the foundation.
When 75% of your customers are unprofitable, scale doesn’t help you just scale inefficiency. Reworking pricing, operations, and the value proposition is not exciting, but it’s what makes everything else possible.
Second, shifting the narrative.
Payoneer is still widely perceived as a payouts company. But the real growth engine today is B2B—larger customers, multi-entity use cases, and managing tens of millions in flows. That’s a completely different product, even if it looks similar on the surface.
The takeaway is simple.
In fintech, growth rarely comes from what’s most visible. It comes from fixing what’s broken and repositioning what you already have.
Everything else is just distribution.